Relaxed, Unmasked & Vaxxed to the Max

The sudden relaxation or abandonment of mask requirements in almost every single Democratic jurisdiction in the country this past week has all the orchestrated spontaneity of the mass Democratic crackdowns on the Occupy camps in 2011.

 Just as President Obama was conveniently out of the country at that time to keep his own hands clean, President Biden is conveniently out to lunch (if not yet completely out of his mind) regarding the evidence-free Semi-Official Cancellation of Covid.  The White House's position, even as the mostly avoidable US death toll from Covid is hovering near the shameful one million mark, is that the wearing of masks should now be up to local and state officials and individual discretion. The confusing new rules or guidelines are that if you're vaxxed, there is no need to be masked, despite the fact that you can still catch the virus. And if you're unvaxxed, you must still wear the mask. Maybe with a big scarlet UV sign on it?

 So hedging his bets, Biden is still recommending the masks be worn by everybody working or  learning in public schools. He certainly doesn't want the blood, or rather the infected respiratory droplets, of potentially millions of children, many of whom are not even partially vaxxed. on his hands. When the next outbreak or variant that they never saw coming emerges, his already-tiresome default reaction of co-opting his deceased son Beau as a means of comforting surviving family members of the victims of any number of state-sanctioned or state-enabled cruelties will have lost all its flaccid punch.

What with record inflation and the exhaustion of ginning up enthusiastic fear over the Russian invasion of Ukraine any minute now, Biden already has enough on his plate, even as most of his aspirational social policy proposals have conveniently been swept off the table. His party's contrived dilemma is the same as it ever was. How can they deliver better "messaging" about their accomplishments in lieu of actually delivering accomplishments? If only people weren't so gosh-darn fickle and attention span-deprived, they'd be expressing their gratitude, for example, for Biden's plan to allocate $5 billion in federal infrastructure aid for electric car-charging stations all over this great vast land of ours.

Even if you yourself can't afford one of these $40-50,000 electric cars, you can at least aspire to achieve access to one, despite the onerous student debt that Biden refuses to wipe out just like that, with one fell swoop of his executive pen. Barring that unicorny relief, you can still admire all the lucky electric car owners for having the environmental wokeness so sorely lacking in deplorable gas-guzzling drivers of 20-year-old rust-buckets held together with unsightly electrical tape. Furthermore,  just think how much easier it will be to ignore the lack of affordable housing in your neighborhood as you revel in the privilege of gazing upon the shiny charging station on the street where you live. Where you literally live, given the expiration of the eviction moratoriums since we've been informed that "we" have all learned to "live with" Covid. 

There are more important things to worry about. Shouldn't we all be joined together in unmasked vaxxed aghastitude at the shocking news that Donald Trump had clogged the White House toilet with incriminating documents? (forget the real shocker that there was apparently not only no working shredder in the place, but apparently only one toilet available to Trump for the flushing of documents in the whole White House). 

I mean, if you can't be satiated on Trump-hate as a healthy substitute for that 1.65-lb package of boneless skinless chicken breasts going for a shocking $20 at the local Stop N Shop, then what can you be satiated on? And especially since, now that masks are no longer required in supermarkets, you can even nibble on the free cheese and cracker samples as a meal substitute without even having to discreetly lower your mask to satiate yourself?

The thing we have to remember to remember at all times is that the good things that the Democrats do for us are being kept hidden. We therefore should keep prodding these overly modest and coy Democrats to be more boastful of these good hidden things, like the electric car charging stations that Biden wants to build.

 So says Paul Krugman, anyway, in his latest New York Times column celebrating Joe Biden's occult improvements to the Health Care Marketplace. How could we ever have missed his "Hidden Health Care Triumph?"  I felt so guilty myself that I almost broke out into a gaslit sweat when I was reading it. Then I remembered to remember that health care is not about the tens of millions of my fellow American citizens who either are uninsured or underinsured, but about the political prospects and fortunes of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.

Krugman:

In any case, whatever its intellectual merits, as a practical political matter Medicare for All isn’t coming to America any time soon. What’s actually at stake in the political arena are more incremental policy changes. Yet such changes can still have a huge effect on health care. And the partisan divide on health policy is as wide as ever.

In the opener of his piece, Krugman had poked fun at the usual diseased GOP fish in a barrel. This go-round it was Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) who'd mal-informatively tweeted out that  “Over 70% of Americans who died with Covid, died on Medicare, and some people want #MedicareForAll?”

Now, where have we heard that fallacious argument against single payer health care before, falsely equating bad health outcomes with government-paid single payer systems? I soon enough remembered to remember. And wiping the beads of gaslight-sweat from my brow and my brain, I posted the following response:

"With all due respect for Medicare for All, you have a single-payer system in Italy — it doesn’t work there.” What Republican uttered those ridiculous words, which posited a link between the terrible death toll in Italy at the start of the global pandemic and the government paying for the care and treatment of its sick people? The answer is Joe Biden, who was scoffing at his "good friend" Bernie Sanders at the March 2020 presidential debate. Biden is such a good guy that he even called Mitch McConnell a good friend of his at this month's National Prayer Breakfast. He is such a good guy that when M4A activist Ady Barkan, who is dying of ALS, interviewed him later in the campaign prodding him to support single payer, Biden at least promised the next best thing: support for a public option. But once safely elected, Biden never uttered the phrase "public option" again. Granted, it is a good thing that more people are getting subsidies to go shopping for private insurance product before they get sick and try to (heaven forfend!) cheat. Actually, it's their insurance companies that are getting the subsidies, including billions from govt-funded COBRA premiums. As for the venal congress-critter from Kentucky ridiculously blaming Medicare for the higher Covid death rate among Medicare recipients, it was probably to deflect attention from the fact that at least 70% of Americans favor M4A, That includes at least a third of GOP voters, some of them his own constituents. 

Speaking of party cults and their hacks, and the media's nauseating regard for Joe Biden's long history of collusion bipartisanship, Times columnist Charles Blow this week purported to be surprised that Biden (he assumed him to be a "good and decent man") had actually bragged about his long friendship with Senate Minority Mitch McConnell, who himself is being praised by more than a few liberals for having the self-preserving courage to disagree with his own party's position that the January Sixth riot was simply "political discourse." 

Blow:

Last week at the National Prayer Breakfast, Biden said this of the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell:

“Mitch, I don’t want to hurt your reputation, but we really are friends. And that is not an epiphany we’re having here at the moment. We’ve always — you’ve always done exactly what you’ve said. You’re a man of word — of your word, and you’re a man of honor. Thank you for being my friend.”

Once I got The Golden Girls theme out of my sweaty brain, I submitted this comment:

It's no surprise that President Biden gushed all over McConnell at the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual event which is not so much about prayer as it is about influence-peddling and pay-to-play. The only deity that they celebrate as one great big happy capitalistic family is the Market God.

They hide their corruption under the sacrament of bipartisanship. They insist against all reason that what citizens really want is not health care, a debt-free education, climate change reversal and living wages - but just that the movers and shakers in Washington just all get along together. Bonhomie among the elites is hazardous to our health. This is especially true when they agree, every single time, to fund the gruesome forever wars and surveillance state without so much as a pretend debate. Their constant litany of having God on their side as they bow their heads in prayer and wave their flags sounds more profane with every passing minute. Let's do away with the national prayer breakfast and implement a truth and reconciliation commission, run by a panel of citizens. Let's follow Aristotle's advice and select them by lot. They couldn't be any worse than the elected "reps" we're saddled with now.

Random Panel of Citizens

Stop Attacking Our Woke Masters of War!

It's time once again to rev up the official outrage machine. Libertarian Fox News personality Tucker Carlson has gone on the air and called America's top general Mark Milley "a stupid pig". This insult was not, unfortunately, because of Milley's leadership roles in the stupid, swinish perma-wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was for taking the liberal side in the stupid, swinish culture wars. Milley had the absolute effrontery to appear before Congress and defend the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) as part of an elective philosophy course offered at the US Military Academy.

So, from the Washington Post's resident neocon Max Boot to the New York Times' liberal Paul Krugman, the pundits of the Duopoly are not only castigating Carlson, they are in lockstep sanctifying Milley and the entire bloated military establishment in the process.

It was only a year ago that the media were piling on in the opposite direction, rightly castigating Milley for his stupid role marching right beside Donald Trump to that infamous church photo-op as federal troops fired teargas canisters at peaceful protesters demonstrating against the George Floyd murder at a park across the street from the White House.

 Since Milley did later apologize for taking part in that swinish bit of political theater, all was forgiven. His career and his reputation were saved and he became openly Woke, embracing diversity training and other putative anti-racism reforms within the ranks, while still maintaining that he finds it very offensive to be called Woke.

Ostentatiously capitalizing the word "white" to, perhaps, virtue-signal its own devotion to racial fairness in its ratings-intensive lucrative culture wars coverage. CNN reported on Milley's retort to GOP provocateur Rep. Mike Walz:

"I want to understand White rage.(said Milley.) And I'm White. And I want to understand it."

Tying the question to the January insurrection, Milley asked: "What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution? What caused that? I want to find that out. I want to maintain an open mind here."

Milley then humble-bragged that reading Marx and Lenin and Chairman Mao did not lead him to Communism. He studied leftist theory merely to obtain "situational understanding" of the Enemy.... apparently in much the same way that the military has co-opted anthropology to glean "total situational awareness" of countries and populations which they invade and occupy.

Over at the New York Times, Krugman, who once upon a time was one of the few pundits critical of the invasion of Iraq, nodded approvingly, unfavorably comparing the swinish cult of Republican ignorance to the enlightened trillion-dollar war machine, now so cozily aligned with the war-happy Democrats, who are once again pretending to feebly challenge Joe Biden's decision to drop more of those high-IQ megaton bombs on Syria and Iraq in supposed defense of the occupying American forces.

All you need to be a good upstanding liberal is to recognize scientific facts. "To be a Republican in good standing," Krugman writes, "one must deny the reality of man-made climate change, or at least oppose any meaningful action to limit greenhouse gas emissions. One must reject or at least express skepticism about the theory of evolution. " 

So it's not enough to criticize Tucker Carlson for criticizing Milley's loyal allegiance to Biden's new anti-terrorism manifesto, which stupidly and swinishly lumps white supremacists in with what it calls "extremist"  critics of capitalism and globalization. You also have to diss leftists and glorify endless war if you want to remain members in good standing of the Club. You must remember that the only racism that counts in this particular narrative is the racism within the military. It does not apply to the racism inherent in the endless wars of aggression against non-Americans in foreign lands.

As Jodi Melamed of Marquette University explains in Represent and Destroy, it is precisely the official civil rights statutes on the American books as well as the mass media's shallow embrace of "diversity" and multiculturalism -- along with corporate-funded academia's complicit production of an elite black managerial-political class -- that paradoxically gives cover to the global racist predations of the American Imperium. The US political system has been able to "capture" the energy of 60s and 70s social movements and then cynically put it to work for capitalism and international conquest. This policy is most recently manifest in an infamous CIA recruitment video, which celebrates feminism and diversity within the unaccountable surveillance/regime change state.

As long as the military starts leaning Democrat and diversified, no war can be unjustified. Writes Krugman: 

"The U.S. military has traditionally leaned Republican, but the modern officer corps is highly educated, open-minded and, dare I say it, even a bit intellectual — because those are attributes that help win wars."

My published response to his column:

Since the leadership of the modern armed forces is now so full of open-minded intellectuals, I'm waiting for them to also testify publicly that since the US military is the biggest single polluter in the history of the world, we should begin shutting down the 800-plus bases around the globe.

Climate change reversal should include divesting ourselves of the tanks, aircraft, nukes, incendiary bombs and ships of our "defense" industry and our forever-wars - which, by the way, we are still not "winning." Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that the modern, open-minded masters of war are embracing critical race theory. Now let's hear the Best & the Brightest also acknowledge that throughout American history, our wars have had a distinctly racist component going all the way back to the Puritans. Before George Washington was a general and a president, he was a real estate speculator who thought that Britain's treaties with Indian populations were a pretty dumb idea, and best ignored. Tucker Carlson and his ilk certainly do come from a long line of landed aristocrats. US regime change wars also have been disproportionately targeted at countries with majority black and brown and Asian populations. You simply can't claim to be woke and still continue bombing innocent people ("collateral damage"). The generals should also read Judith Butler's great essays on violence, and wake up to the fact that our leaders consider that some lives simply aren't worth enough to be grievable.

Slash Away and Dash Away: A Hallmark Covid Christmas Special

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

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

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

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

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

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

Select countries by economic relief, as a percent of GDP

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

Japan

42.2%

Slovenia

24.5%

Sweden

20.9%

Finland

20.8%

Germany

20.3%

United States

18.3%

Australia

16.8%

Canada

16.4%

France

15.8%

Italy

13.0%

Brazil

12.0%

New Zealand

10.9%

Spain

10.7%

United Kingdom

9.0%

NOTE: Figures show fiscal measures, not monetary policies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dreadicare For All Elites Who Don't Want It

Second only to the astroturfed impeachment marches threatening to spread like chemical wildfire in the well-off parts of Blue America is the overwhelming anxiety over ascendant candidate Elizabeth Warren.

Members of the neoliberal pundit class are gnashing their collective teeth about Warren's imminent unveiling of her detailed Medicare For All/Some/Who Knows Plan. Will she or won't she advocate for a true single payer program like the one introduced by Bernie Sanders?

The conventional wisdom among the corporate wing of the Democratic Party is that if she does, she's toast. And if she's toast, then Trump wins another term. So be afraid. Be very afraid, all you One Percenters who know full well that your scare tactics are bullshit, given that most Democratic and independent voters,  and even a sizable percentage of Republicans from Trump's own base, favor Medicare For All. It's only when the pollsters and the gaslighting pundits put the fear of losing their employer-based coverage and the prospect of the Great Unknown into their heads that many respondents will then say "well... maybe on second thought I'm not as gung-ho as I thought I was."

This instillation of fear and doubt is, of course, the gist of the grand plan to kill M4A before it ever gets a fact-based hearing. Tax-averse multimillionaire moderators of the so-called Democratic debates always preface their questions with the specter of middle class tax increases, giving left-leaning candidates thirty seconds to respond before the buzzer goes off and the moderators invite a low-ranking corporate centrist to chime in with the industry-approved rebuttal.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, a big fan of Warren's based upon their mutual exalted wonkishness, is very worried that she won't be able to keep up her evasive bullshit on M4A very much longer.

Like many policy wonks, I’ll be waiting with bated breath; this could be a make or break moment for her campaign, and possibly for the 2020 election.

Phony talking point #1: all this reckless M4A rhetoric will hand the election right to Trump. 

Single payer has a lot to recommend it.... but we're not starting from scratch... More than half of Americans are covered by private health insurance, mainly through employers.

Industry-approved talking point #2: In theory and on paper, we love, love, love Single Payer. But the people we really need to care about right now are the vulnerable well-paid professionals in our base, whom for propaganda purposes only, we shall now squeamishly dump in with the teeming masses of low-paid workers forced to fork over a chunk of their paychecks for the company insurance plan, which is usually inefficient and limited at best, and pure exploitative junk at worst.

 Most people probably would end up better off under single-payer, but convincing them of that would be a hard sell; polls show much less support for Medicare for all than for a “public option” plan in which people could retain private insurance if they chose to.

Misleading Talking Point #3: It's not that we wonks are against single payer in principal. It's that the Deplorables are so gosh-darn stupid. And we wonks simply don't have either the time or the inclination to try to educate these rubes on all the money they'd save under M4A. Besides, our target audience is restricted to our fellow wonks and to the already well-insured upper middle class readership who can afford a subscription to the New York Times. 

Which brings me to the third point: In reality, single-payer won’t happen any time soon. Even if Democrats win in a landslide in 2020, taking control of the Senate as well as the White House, it’s very unlikely that they will have the votes to eliminate private insurance.Warren, who has made policy seriousness a key part of her political persona — “Warren has a plan for that” — surely knows all of this. And early this year she seemed to recognize the problems with a purist single-payer approach, saying that she was open to different paths toward universal coverage.
Since then, however, she seems to have gone all in for the elimination of private insurance.

Annoying Talking Point #4: People who want to have a healthy life and not die or go bankrupt if they get sick are "purists" who belong to some weird kind of Bernie Bro Cult. They're making impossible, annoying demands on the Elite Class... which has no such worries, thank you veddy much. Now get lost, you bunch of sickos! Because "our side" winning back power is more important than you are.

The plan in the works will presumably try to dispel that fog, but doing so will be tricky. An independent estimate from the Urban Institute (which is, for what it’s worth, left-leaning) suggests that a highly comprehensive Medicare-for-all plan, similar to what Sanders is proposing, would substantially increase overall health spending, although a more modest plan wouldn’t.

Krugman creates some fog of his own by failing to mention that the Urban Institute is funded by such M4A-averse corporations as private health insurer CIGNA and pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. So you should probably take their scary cost estimates with a huge hunk of LSD-laced salt.

Chairing the Urban Institute's Board of plutocrats is Jamie Gorelick, who is also kept busy acting as Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump's personal lawyer. She defended them, among other grifty things, against nepotism accusations when they first joined the Trump administration. Jared's brother also has a vested interest in killing M4A because he happens to own his own multibillion-dollar health insurance company founded right after the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

 Other directors of the Urban Institute are N. Gregory Mankiw, who led George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers and who infamously advocated privatizing Social Security and cutting benefits; former Obama "Catfood" Commissioner and billionaire austerian Erskine Bowles; Diana Farrell, CEO of the JP Morgan Chase Institute; and Facebook executive Marne L. Levine.

So if Krugman is actually calling the Urban Institute "left-leaning" with a crew like that calling the shots, then the Democratic Party has moved even farther right than I thought.

No wonder he's rhetorically wringing his hands over "capitalist to my bones" Elizabeth Warren's mild threat to the ruling class. If she doesn't watch out and mind her wonkish Ps and Qs and "escape the Medicare trap," she might very well turn into Susan Sarandon or heaven forbid, even a dreaded "unwitting Russian asset."

My published New York Times response:

The real question is whether the estimated 87 million people who are uninsured or underinsured can escape premature death, life-long disability through negligence of their medical conditions, or bankruptcy - with the subsequent inability to get a job, rent an apartment or take out a car loan.

 Elizabeth Warren will do what she has to do. So will the congress critters in thrall to the insurance and hospital and pharmaceutical lobbies. So along with taking to the streets to demand the impeachment of Donald Trump, we're also going to need to take to the streets to demand what in every other advanced country on earth is a basic human right. Sure, M4A would cost a bundle and it has to be paid for. But it would cost a heckuva lot less than what we're currently paying to predatory insurance companies, for criminally overpriced drugs, and for obscenely padded hospital bills.

 If people are anxious about losing their employment-based coverage, it's largely because both politicians and pundits don't hammer home the essential fact that any increases in taxes will be at most half of what they now pay for premiums, co-pays and deductibles. Furthermore, employment based coverage is getting more precarious, with employers reducing or discontinuing coverage due to higher costs. Think of the bargaining power that workers will get if their bosses no longer can claim that their health benefits are a huge chunk of their salaries. Sounds like a plan to me. It also sounds extremely humane.

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Corporatists Behaving Badly

Let me get this straight. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin have miraculously just come to a silky-smooth bipartisan budget agreement that rips the feathers right off the deficit hawks and kills the Obama-era Sequester and fake debt ceiling crises all in one swoop.

The catch is that the debt ceiling truce is only for two years. So if a Democrat wins the White House and the GOP holds the Senate, it will be back to deficit hawkery as a bipartisan weapon to kill any possible resurgence of the New Deal.

Meanwhile, Trump is happy because the deal protects the war machine and "our veterans" and contains no poison pills that would nauseate rich people. The Democrats will not interfere with his border wall, and the Hyde Amendment prohibiting federal funding for abortions will remain. Pelosi is happy because the deal "will enhance our national security and invest in middle class priorities that advance the health, financial security and well-being of the American people."

But Trump being Trump, it is entirely possible that he'll ultimately refuse to sign it no matter how much he praises it today. And Pelosi being Pelosi, she utters not one single word about helping the tens of millions of people now living in abject poverty in the United States. Bare survival priorities, such as food and shelter, are not the same thing as middle class priorities, which might include such things as somewhat more affordable prescription drugs and protecting our right to purchase expensive health insurance on the predatory marketplace.

Before we celebrate, therefore, we need to read the fine print in this proposed budget deal. Because whenever politicians "reach across the aisle" in one of those rare bipartisan moments of good feeling, we ordinary people must steel ourselves for the blows that are sure to come. The very fact that the deal was reached so secretly and so hastily and that it must be voted on before the artificial deadline of the Congressional summer recess, is our first clue that bipartisanship is the exact opposite of social and economic justice. This deal must go through before anybody even has a chance to read it.

That's how many poison pills for struggling people and how many gifts to the oligarchs that this package undoubtedly contains.

Take the issue of the nation's community health centers, which deal or no deal, appeared to be very much on the bipartisan chopping block as recently as last week. These centers, which serve the poor, are therefore conveniently and cynically exempt from Pelosi's "middle class priorities."

The Democratic lawmakers proposing the cuts frame their cruelty in the usual way: in order to be kind and save the poor, they have no choice but to punish and sacrifice the poor, because otherwise the Republican hostage takers will beat the poor into a bloody dead pulp.

As reported by the Washington Post,

Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is pushing a bipartisan plan that would provide flat levels of federal funding for hundreds of community health centers nationwide, at about $4 billion for the next four years. A similar plan is advancing in the Senate with the support of Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee.
Lawmakers face a September deadline for the community health centers, after which their funding would begin to expire, likely leading to steep cuts.Pallone said the plan would provide the security of the longest guaranteed funding commitment ever secured by the clinics, averting the September cliff. But flat funding would not keep pace with medical inflation, likely forcing the community health centers to serve about 4 million fewer people annually by 2023 than they do now, said Leighton Ku, professor of health policy at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health.
That prospect has alarmed liberal lawmakers including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), co-chair of the congressional Progressive Caucus. They argue Democrats should use their control of the House to approve increases in funding for the centers, and then hammer out an agreement with Senate Republicans.
“I was, quite honestly, stunned. It’s just absolutely disastrous, and moving in the wrong direction,” said Sanders, a 2020 presidential candidate, in an interview. “We should be substantially increasing funding. I was very, very disappointed by Democratic leadership … We will do everything we can to rectify this.”

We still don't know if the TrumPelosi Manifesto contains the bait and switch method of reducing health care for the poor, or whether it's a side-deal negotiated apart from the budget agreement.

It is also quite telling that Trump waited until right after the budget agreement was announced to reveal plans to kick three million people off their food stamp benefits. In so doing, he gives credence to Pelosi's limited boast of protecting the financial interests of the "middle class" -- or those living above the poverty levels necessary to qualify for government nutrition assistance.

And speaking of bait and switch, the fact that Bernie Sanders is still going strong, and is even finally getting more refreshingly blunt about such corporate tools as Joe Biden, has finally elicited the full-blown hysteria of New York Times pundit Paul Krugman, who'd so far this campaign season kept his storied anti-Bernie powder dry, mainly by studiously ignoring Bernie Sanders.

Not any more. In a transparently bad-faith "both sides do it" column, ironically subtitled "A Bad Faith Debate Over Health Care Coverage," Krugman hilariously equates Biden's mendacity with Bernie's exposure of his mendacity.

But right now, two of the major contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, are having an ugly argument about health care that could hurt the party’s chances. There are real, important differences between the two men’s policy proposals, and it’s fine to point that out. What’s not fine is the name-calling and false assertions. Both men are behaving badly. And for their party’s sake, and their country’s, they need to stop it.

Notwithstanding that Krugman cannot point to one single example of Sanders calling Biden any bad names or lying (because he hasn't) the accusation is simply cover for his main point: he doesn't want Medicare For All to be a platform in the presidential campaign, even though he likes Single Payer "in theory". The column is all of a piece with the centrist, or corporate wing of the party, striving to please its deep-pocketed donors at the expense of everybody else. The message is this: you can get rid of Trump, or you can clamor for things that will make your lives better. But you cannot do both. Supporting Medicare For All is the same thing as giving Trump another term. Therefore, everybody please shut up about your damned health. And that includes the 70-80 percent of you in favor of Medicare For All. You're nothing but a distraction.

Also, now that Pelosi's attempted diminution of the "Squad's" championship of single payer health care has spectacularly backfired, the corporate party and its pundits need a new scapegoat with which to undermine Single Payer, even as they pretend to embrace the dark-hued female members as a means of combating Trump's racism.  Bernie Sanders, an old white guy, fits their bill perfectly. A Democratic legal pundit who hilariously calls herself a "moderate" can even go on MSNBC and complain that he "makes my skin crawl and I don't know why" with no consequence whatsoever.

Here's my published response to Krugman, in which I refused to take his slimy personality-politics bait, but instead tried to address the centrist groupthink propaganda that he so shamelessly parrots:

Whenever you hear universal coverage defined as everyone having "access" to "affordable" health care, beware of the bait and switch.

 Access to care is not the same thing as guaranteed care. Calling a trip to the doctor or emergency room "affordable" is glib to the point of cruelty, given that the majority of Americans don't even have $500 in savings.

The standard talking point that "folks" will never accept a Single Payer program because they are loath to give up their wonderful employer-based plans is also pretty cynical. Employers not only change plans regularly, they are increasingly passing the costs of overpriced plans with less coverage along to their workers.

If people are afraid of Medicare For All, it's mainly because our rulers and their corporate media stenographers, beholden to the insurance cartel and Big Pharma and their Wall Street investors, are making sure they stay very afraid of it. It's obviously not in their job descriptions to educate people and inform them that the taxes for Single Payer will be far, far lower than what they now pay to the predatory health care marketplace, with the continued risk that they can go bankrupt if they get hurt or sick.

 Once Single Payer is passed, and the profit motive goes out of health care, it will be repeal-proof. It will be as popular as Medicare For Some is right now. That's what has the wealthy donor class shaking in their custom-made shoes: the prospect of too many people becoming healthy and less stressed.

Picking At the Trump Pimple

Depending on whether you're a fan or a critic, Donald Trump in Europe was either too sexy for his shirt or too big for his britches. Or maybe his tailor quit in the middle of the job because Trump's deposit check had bounced. This is the picture that all the fashionista pundits couldn't stop talking about this week:

The next-most earth-shattering thing they're talking about, now that Trump's insults to Meghan Markle and the mayor of London are disappearing into the ether to keep the Trump Baby Balloon company, is that Trump threatened to single-handedly destroy Britain's beloved National Health Service!  Its demise will be the offer the Brits will be unable to refuse if they have any hope of a post-Brexit trade deal with Trump's United States.

"Mar-a-Lago Comes For British Health!" is the dire warning of the New York Times's Paul Krugman.

That would be the same Paul Krugman who warned only three years ago that the nefarious Bernie Sanders was coming for Obamacare, and who continues to speciously argue that single payer health care espoused by Sanders and other progressives is next to impossible "in the current climate.

Krugman writes,

As it happens, the British and American health systems lie at opposite ends of a spectrum defined by the relative roles of the private and public sectors.

 Although the Affordable Care Act expanded health coverage and increased the role of Medicaid, most Americans still get their insurance (if they get it at all) from private companies and get treated at for-profit hospitals and clinics. In other countries, like Canada, the government pays the bills, but health providers are private. Britain, however, has true socialized medicine: The government owns the hospitals and pays the doctors.

That skirts the truth, to put it politely. As I responded to Krugman in my published comment: 

The NHS is already opened up to private US companies and it has been at least since 2006. That was when the Hospital Corporation of America partnered with British medical facilities that serve only private patients.

 Other US-based corporations have followed suit, with the stated anodyne objective along the lines of "improving efficiencies" and other neoliberal buzz-phrases to mask creeping privatization.

Optum, a division of UnitedHealth, works with the NHS in contract negotiations and medications management. Kaiser Permanente also "advises" the NHS, and IBM provides it with electronic records services.

 This has mostly been under the radar, until Donald Trump came along and did his usual oafish thing. No wonder that the discreet wing of the ruling class can't stand him. He rips the mask right off all the plunder and the greed. He bellows that he wants to destroy the social contract wherever it exists in the world, from a platform where everybody can hear him, thus endangering the whole late-capitalistic plan.

A Henry Kissinger he definitely is not. It wasn't until years after the fact that the Kissinger-Nixon plot to "make Chile's economy scream" by overthrowing the socialist government with a CIA coup became widely known. Then it was too late.

 It's not too late in Britain. And hopefully, it's not even too late in the United States

Why do we keep hearing that Medicare for All is "impossible?"

 For one reason: It'd put a dent in the profits of the voracious oligarchy.

The most radical shift in the stealthy undoing of the NHS came in 2012, with the passage of Britain's Health and Social Care Act. This law specifically enforces a restructuring of the system based upon the advice of McKinsey, the US-based global consulting firm which has come in for some well-deserved criticism lately. As the public advocacy group Patients4NHS explains:

The Act ordered the NHS to use the private sector: it made it compulsory for those services that potentially could be provided by non-NHS organisations to be put out to competitive tender. Private companies are now involved in a wide range of NHS services, from GP or out-of-hours care to diagnostic services (such as scans or blood tests), elective (or routine) surgery and ambulance services. In addition, private, multinational consultancy firms are being paid considerable amounts of taxpayers’ money for advising NHS providers, such as hospital Trusts, on managing their service.

The NHS was already on the chopping block in the Obama era's secretive trade deals, such as the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA), which not only would give private US-based corporations the right to destroy Britain's socialized medical care system, but would prevent any future governments from ever reversing the privatization!

So perhaps we should thank Donald Trump's freely oozing mouth for warning us about the systemic cancer which lurks beneath. He is putting his unwitting squeeze right on the corporate propaganda campaign which continues to vociferously deny that Britain's health care system is on the chopping block in trade extortion schemes that long preceded, and go far beyond, Donald Trump's clumsy unfiltered threats.

Ominously, the private companies already infiltrating the NHS are still permitted to use the NHS logo, thus further deliberately hiding their for-profit agenda from the British public. 

So Krugman and other critics who pile on Trump to the exclusion of critiquing the entire transnational anti-democratic corrupt system that created him in the first place are themselves doing harm by picking on just one particularly annoying unsightly zit while ignoring a whole body full of chronic deep-tissue lesions.

This is what critics who are not Trump, from both the right and the left, mean when they accuse the mainstream corporate media of purveying "fake news," both by commission and by omission. Krugman is no dummy. He knows, or should know, that the danger to the NHS preceded Trump by decades, and that the plunder of social welfare programs around the world will long outlast Trump - unless, of course, capitalism eats itself into extinction first.

Trump is simply the most glaring contemporary symbol, and symptom, of malignant terminal capitalism. Getting rid of him might feel good in the short term, but it's no cure for what deeply ails the sick and decaying body politic.

There's plenty more where he came from, within the highly weaponized Defense of Wealth industry.