Our Own Little Gazas

 Gaza has been aptly described as a high tech laboratory experiment for how to most efficiently oppress, surveil, starve, torture, and ultimately dispose of a population deemed to be nothing but excessive, superfluous human flesh taking up too much valuable land and resources.

At its essence, the US-financed genocide by the state of Israel of some two million Palestinians confined in their open-air prison is the ultimate expression of the global class war being waged by multinational oligarchs and militarized corporations against the rest of us.

So it's not just empathy and outrage that's spurring hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of us to take to the streets in protest. It is the shock of realizing that we could very well be next. Too many of us are there already, trapped in the gulags of crushing medical and education debt, low-paid work and unemployment, evictions leading to homelessness, and - especially if we have a darker skin color -  police brutality and mass incarceration.

Gaza is the paradigmatic example of what Achille Mbambe, in his 2019 book Necropolitcs, terms the "matrix of rule" by the ruling oligarchy. Gaza is both a supercharged reiteration of the settler-colonialist atrocities of the fairly recent past, and a warning of what they have in store for us the not-too-distant future.

While they're so busily killing Palestinians, a surplus population sitting on top of what is believed to be a wealth of oil deposits, they're also in a near-frantic crusade of trying to quash dissent in the parts of the world that are still relatively free. For, as Mbembe writes,

"Unmistakably, an ever increasing multitude of voices are making themselves heard... human chains of solidarity are forming. In the darkenss of fear and denunciation, and faced with unrelenting waves of repression, compassionate men and women seek to awaken the sleeping fireflies of hospitaliity and solidarity. In the midst of an otherwise troubling anesthesia, an active minority is taking a stance. With renewed vigor they seek to denounce acts carried out in their name against the Other - who, it is claimed, is not one of us."

In a rank display of their own panic at being caught out in their crimes and lies by the masses of people, our ruling oligarchs and their political lackeys have resorted to plastering the anti-Semite label on the dissenters in a vain attempt to shut us up. This gaslighting has largely failed. So fully two months after October 7th, they are regaling us with graphic propaganda about Hamas incels sexually assaulting Israeli women. When they had to walk back their wild claims of having personally witnessed the beheadings of Jewish babies, they are now whipping up visions of Israeli women being shot in their private parts and abused even in death. Needless to say, the usual suspects have produced no evidence to back up their lurid claims.

But let us, just for the sake of argument, concede that rapes and worse were committed by Hamas. This still does not justify obliterating tens of thousands of Palestinians with bombs and tanks. And let us, also just for the sake of argument, acknowledge that this "war" has emboldened closet anti-Semites to act out their fantasies in public, even on elite college campuses. This does not justify smearing antiwar and anti-genocide protesters with the anti-Semite label, or conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.. Such tactics are a classic case of Freudian projection.

It brings back nauseating memories of late Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who once publicly admitted that the deaths, by US sanctions, of half a million Iraqi children had been "worth it" in that war for oil, and whom Joe Biden so fondly evokes when he talks about the wars in Ukraine and against Gaza. Albright also had infamously remarked during the 2016 presidential campaign that "there is a special place in hell for women who don't support other women." She was talking, of course, about Hillary Clinton and the female supporters of Bernie Sanders. What she meant was that if you moved beyond the corporate version of feminism and supported policies for the greater public good, you were damned. 

It is indicative of their own consciousness of guilt that the Biden administration waited until 11 p.m. Friday to notify Congress that it was bypassing them and unilaterally giving Israel hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of tank ammunition in order to continue killing Palestinian civilians at the speed of light. Whenever the extermination of powerless trapped people is deemed to be an "emergency," then the niceties of democratic procedure do not apply. Plus, the end-run by the State Department conveniently absolves Congress of actually having to take a principled stand against sending money and bombs to Israel. It's such a clever way avoiding accountability to their dissenting constituents.

It's both ironic and even somewhat entertaining to watch the billionaires and their corrupt political lackeys so publicly accosting the same elite Ivy League presidents they put into office for the express purpose of laundering administering billions of dollars in tax-exempt oligarchic slush funds. 

Claudine Gay, Harvard's current president and one of the trio of female administrators hauled before Congress last week and damned for defending the free speech of students, was handpicked for her job by billionaire heiress Penny Pritzker, the former Obama administration commerce secretary who now heads what is aptly called the "Harvard Corporation." Pritzger was also recently named by Joe Biden to lead the postwar multinational corporate  plunder of Ukraine. The corruption is all right out there in the open: elite universities are primarily for-profit corporations, where the education of young people is only the fig leaf. Students are there not to learn, but to be credentialed for elite careers.  They are definitely not to be heard. Too many of them, apparently, did not get the message that as the lucky golden ticket-holders in an overpriced Willy Wonka diploma mill, they're doomed to the hell of the careerist garbage chute when they become too loud and demanding and free-thinking.

Speaking of the mask being ripped right off the Ivy League, it turns out that at least some students have given the aforementioned Hillary Clinton a failing grade in the "Rate My Professor" online survey. Not only did Hillary castigate the pro-Palestinian student protesters on the Columbia University campus - she accused them of  being complicit i in alleged Hamas sex crimes against Israeli women by marching in support of Palestinian women.

she didn't have the guts to  confront the young people in person. In fact, she avoided her students like the plague. She refused to take most questions and left class early when she bothered to show up at all. 

This is according to one disgruntled former student writing in the Huff Post, perhaps Clinton's worst offense was her refusal to even glance at the written work submitted by her students, instead handing it over to low-paid adjuncts to read and grade. 

And these students were the lucky ones, because future attendees of   Hillary's class will have to make do with the video version of what she recently performed. The entire semester was filmed so that Clinton will never again have to return to academia in the actual flesh.

 However, hefty tuition will still be charged for the class, and her handsome residuals as a college performance celebrity will continue to be paid by the Columbia corporation.

Let the masks continue to fall, preferably all the way to hell where they can keep Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger company for all eternity.

The Myth of the Decent President

It's OK to be disgusted by the Democratic Party. It's also OK to be mad at "It's OK To Be Angry About Capitalism," the just-published book by Bernie Sanders.

Even though Bernie is more than adept at writing an impassioned stemwinder of a screed, railing against the evils of corporate greed and bemoaning the outsized influence that oligarchs now wield in the erstwhile party of working and poor people, he not only largely gives individual Democrats a pass, he mostly avoids even mentioning their names. Sanders euphemizes Barack Obama, for instance, as the "Status Quo" which in a purely passive voice convinced centrist Democrats like Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar to leave the 2020 primary race (while Sanders was still leading in the polls) and close ranks around Joe Biden.... Bernie's "very good friend."

So it's the title of Sanders's book that is so misleading, not to mention his introductory claim that the older he gets, the more radical he gets. But radically what, you may well ask yourself as you turn the pages. It's like reading a bowdlerized, Censorship-Industrial Complex version of The Communist Manifesto, in which Karl Marx divides his time and his chapters between urging the workers of the world to unite, and canoodling in the House of Lords, where he is ever so grateful to be barely tolerated by the In-Crowd.

You can't call for a socialist revolution and celebrate the politicians who serve capitalists at the same time and in the same breath. You just can't.  When Bernie demands of Democrats to decide "which side are you on?" he can't even seem to answer his own question.

 Sanders confesses that Biden was only able to beat Donald Trump in 2020  because Bernie himself had convinced enough of his disaffected supporters that Uncle Joe would be the reincarnation of FDR, if they would only show up to vote for him. After all, Bernie had already strong-armed Uncle Joe into making such grudging concessions as lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 60, outlawing private, for-profit prisons and immigrant detention centers, and creating a government-run public health care insurance option.

Granted, the ink on the new Sanders tome was barely dry when Biden made his utterly predictable return to his right-wing roots this year with the installation of a private equity mogul as his chief of staff, aided and abetted by a duo of husband-wife corporate lobbyists. And not only is Biden continuing Donald Trump's harsh immigration policies, his creation of a climate change task force to placate progressives during his campaign has now morphed into allowing oil company drilling on federal Alaska land and in the Gulf of Mexico. And as far as FDR's safety net is concerned, Biden and his party have been absolutely mute as tens of millions of people are losing their Medicaid coverage and having their food stamp stipends drastically reduced. This is because politicians in both parties have made a conscious choice to ignore a still-raging pandemic.

These realities make reading Bernie's book, with its frequent praise of Biden as a "decent man" all the more poignant, if not downright cringeworthy.

This long-running media myth of Joe Biden's alleged innate decency making up for his "gaffes" and hypocrisy and corruption is getting more bizarre by the day, in fact - especially given the president's rank bellicosity as regards both the proxy war with Russia and his undisguised belligerence toward China.

Come to think of it, America's warmongers have usually been "decent" men, faithful to their wives and devoted to their families and pets and polite to their colleagues as they've gone about the business of displacing, maiming and killing people all over the world with their invasions, their bullets, their bombs, and their economic sanctions. It's no surprise, therefore, that other than blasting America's obscene military budget to make the point that this money could be better used for the health care of our own citizens, Bernie Sanders does not engage in any antiwar rhetoric in his book. The proxy war in Ukraine? What's that?

The biggest enemy in the book is, of course, Donald Trump.

 Trump is not a decent man. He is a slap in the face to all that is proper and moralistic among his fellow thieves and plutocrats. Why else would the Democratic machine and its prosecutors choose to indict him for a payoff to a porn star rather than, say, for inciting a riot in the Capitol and openly trying to bribe and extort various officials into overturning the 2020 election?

"It;s OK To Be Angry About Capitalism" zigzags uncomfortably and discordantly between the fight for social and economic justice and an obsequious homage to the very figures in the American political system who have thwarted social and economic justice for decades. For example:

"Yet while Joe was a good deal more conservative than I was on domestic and foreign policy issues, I liked him personally. He was a decent man, down-to-earth, family-oriented, warm and good humored. He talked a lot about his working class roots, which I appreciated, as I did his enthusiasm for organized labor."

Yes, Biden would soon prove to be so enthusiastic about organized labor that he enforced a strikebreaking contract for railroad workers that denied them their own decent life with enough time off to be even minimally devoted to their own families.

Nevertheless, Bernie persists:

When Joe served as President Barack Obama's vice president, he invited me several times to the Naval Observatory, the vice presidential residence in Washington. He took an interest in my 2016 presidential campaign and while he remained neutral in the competition between Hillary Clinton and myself, he was not shy about offering insights and advice. That drew us closer, as did the fact that my wife, Jane, and Joe's wife Jill developed a friendship as Senate spouses."

Why am I getting a flashback of Sally Field's "you like me, you really like me!" Oscar acceptance speech?

Sanders goes on to fondly reminisce about soaking up all the Biden flattery when Bernie livestreamed his official endorsement of Uncle Joe.

Joe accepted the endorsement warmly, saying "You don't get enough credit, Bernie, for being the voice that forces us to take a hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves if we've done enough. And we haven't... I'm going to need you, not just to win the campaign, but to govern." 

Sanders proclaimed himself satisfied that Biden then appointed various task forces to explore his progressive agenda. Medicare For All was off the table. So was full student debt forgiveness. Baby steps are better than Trump, though. 

Fast forward a couple of years, and Biden has installed a former Bain Capital vulture to rule the West Wing. He took a hard look in the mirror and apparently decided he hasn't done enough to immiserate already desperate people, those people who are not members in good standing of the Democratic voting base - that is, the top 20 percent of income earners.

If Bernie Sanders ever retires from the Senate, perhaps he can write a sequel called Fooled Me Once, Fooled Me Twice. Maybe he can even pick a side.

Midterms: The Dead Sea of Democracy

 Today's Narrative: like a born-again Moses, Joe Biden has led his people out of the desert, parting the Red Sea just long enough to stave off a full-scale disaster for as long as another month. Much depends (as of this writing) on the outcomes of four close Senate races.

 The ballyhooed Republican "Red Sea" tsunami of doom failed to materialize, and voter turnout was unusually high for a midterm election. So perhaps the Battle for Democracy and the Soul of the Nation melodrama had some life in it after all. Fear of fear itself is a pretty good incentive to vote.  So, apparently, is the danger to women's reproductive rights caused by the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe Vs Wade. Even residents of deep-red Kentucky voted in a special referendum to maintain their abortion rights.

Unfortunately, the fear factor in this campaign did not extend as far as Democrats placing the pandemic and the climate disaster front and center of their agenda. Consultants said it was better for their careers to wrap their fear-fomentation in the gauzy rhetoric of patriotism and the old standby of lesser-evilism.

Meanwhile, over in the real Egypt, the United Nations COP-27 climate conference is being sponsored by among other corporations, big polluter and water-thief Coca-Cola. It's being attended by global dignitaries flown in on their carbon-spewing private jets, who will substitute the trading of carbon offsets and other financialized gimmicks for true ironclad emission restrictions. The world's richest nations, including the United States, are also fighting like hell to avoid the payment of any direct reparations to the poor countries which bare the brunt of capitalistic pollution and global warming.

Hewing true to neoliberal dogma - that the very same capitalistic "market" forces wreaking such epic havoc are the only ones that can fix it -  American climate envoy John Kerry is pushing an alternate way to compensate poor countries - but only if they first slavishly agree to cut their own paltry emissions.

And despite the fact that control of the next Congress is still very much up in the choking air, Kerry blithely assured his fellow attendees that with the Republicans in charge, it is simply not realistic to expect the United States to pay no-strings-attached direct compensation or reparations to the victims of rapacious pollution. There must always be hoops for victims to jump through in order to qualify for even barest recompense from the overlords. It's the neoliberal way.

Kerry in his remarks at the conference promised the initiative would generate finance that would “supplement, not replace, other forms of finance.”

Kerry’s proposal would tap private dollars to help fill the gap in climate finance. Kerry formulated the framework with heavy consultation from U.S. banks, and the State Department and the Rockefeller Foundation have held meetings with experts in New York and Washington over the past several months.

Experts who participated in those meetings said finance could be made available in advance of power sector upgrades, like the early retirement of coal plants, new wind or solar capacity, or upgrades to the power grid.

The key word is, of course, private. "Financing" measures to combat climate change in poor countries sound suspiciously like predatory lending... on top of the already predatory IMF debt imposed on Global South nations by the banking cartel. The too big to fail/jail banks and the military-industrial complex - in other words, the main culprits in climate change - will get to decide how to pretend to reverse climate change while cashing in on an existential threat. Let's face it, their sociopathy makes Trumpism look like a comparative pimple. All pimples eventually go away. It's the systemic disease that's fatal.

Now, about the pandemic, and our government's de facto program of eugenics. Despite Biden's decree a few months back, Covid is very much still not over. His administration did grudgingly extend the federal public health emergency right before the midterms, out of fear that canceling it - the result being millions of people potentially getting kicked off expanded Medicaid and food assistance - would also lead to negative political outcomes for the Democrats.

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra promised to give the states 60 days' notice (by this mid-month) before formally ending the official emergency, which is now due to expire on January 11th. With an expected winter surge of variants, and despite the inconvenient truth that between 300 and 400 US citizens are still dying from this virus every single day, the administration has been dropping ominous hints, such as issuing guidelines for states to deal with the "churn" that such a gratuitous stop in aid implies. Pediatricians are especially concerned, given the concurrent outbreaks of severe influenza and RSV that already are filling some hospitals to the breaking point.  

The double whammy of ending both food and medical benefits to the most vulnerable people at this moment in time would be especially cruel, given that food security and health security are inseparable human needs. And it's not even taking into account the increasing cost of groceries, caused in large part by the greed of corporations like the aforementioned Coca-Cola. According to the public health journal STAT:

Households rarely experience food insecurity, poverty, or poor health in isolation. Instead, they are linked in a cycle in which high health care costs strain household budgets and lead to food insecurity while, at the same time, food insecurity leads to stress and poor nutrition, which results in poor health.

Given significant gaps between wages and costs of living for families with low incomes, households generally participate in multiple federal assistance programs to make ends meet. In 2017, 89% of children receiving SNAP support also received support from Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). During Covid-19, both programs experienced dramatic increases in enrollment.

Even though the White House has cast blame on a gridlocked Congress for failing to appropriate more funds to fight the pandemic, Biden himself never made Covid an issue during the campaign. But serendipitously enough, a repeat of a Georgia Senate seat runoff may force the White House to delay its plans again, and extend the federal health emergency at least through March 2023. Just as they did in the 2020 runoff, the Democrats might have to continue their campaign into December. It was during the last time the Senate was up for grabs that Biden held out the carrot of $2,000 checks for every American, only to switch to the grudging stick of $1,400 once Team Blue won their slim majority.

So maybe the poor and the sick, the young and the old, will receive another brief stay of execution for purely political reasons. Maybe the estimated 14 percent of children rescued from poverty by the public health declaration renewals can eat and go to the doctor for another three months.

Regardless of electoral outcome, Congress will remain the same as it ever was: a Dead Sea where democracy drowned decades ago, and where only the politicos and influence peddlers are still visible, bobbing about in the pool like celebrity contestants in the corporate-funded zombie olympics.

The Rewards of Rapacity

"For decades, Michael Steinhardt displayed a rapacious appetite for plundered artifacts without concern for the legality of his actions, the legitimacy of the pieces he bought and sold, the grievous cultural damage he wrought across the globe," thundered Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. this week.

Michael Steinhardt

Whereupon the outgoing Democratic prosecutor promptly forgave the billionaire raptor, dropping a four-year criminal investigation in exchange for the octogenarian promising to stay out of the criminal antiquities racket for the rest of his life. He didn't even have to pay the usual sweetheart tax deduction of a fine that criminal oligarchs commonly use to buy their way out of accountability on the relatively rare occasions that they do get charged. 

Steinhardt is doubly protected, though, always having had the protection racket known as the Duoply on his side. What the corporate media are not reporting about this sordid case is that it was largely Steinhardt's hedge fund money that forged the Democratic Party's hard right turn in the late 1980s with the founding of the Democratic Leadership Council. A major financier of Bill Clinton's campaign for the presidency. Steinhardt naturally was named the very first chairman of the DLC, as well as heading its inaptly named think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute.

Oh, and he also was one of the chief architects of Clinton's notorious pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.

So, like any oligarchic raptor worth his salt, Steinhardt is not only proclaiming his innocence, he is playing the victim card this week. The New York Times (which dutifully ignored Steinhardt's arguably worse crime of transforming the Democratic Party into the rapacious corporate entity that it is today) reported:

In a statement on Monday, his lawyer, Andrew J. Levander, said: “Mr. Steinhardt is pleased that the District Attorney’s yearslong investigation has concluded without any charges, and that items wrongfully taken by others will be returned to their native countries. Many of the dealers from whom Mr. Steinhardt bought these items made specific representations as to the dealers’ lawful title to the items, and to their alleged provenance. To the extent these representations were false, Mr. Steinhardt has reserved his rights to seek recompense from the dealers involved.”

Good luck suing af least a few of the mobsters he trafficked with, because they are not as lucky as Steinhardt and unlike him, were convicted on the thefts and are sitting in Italian jails.

Vance, who had once declined to prosecute Harvey Weinstein even after a police sting operation captured his predatory behavior on tape, and who gave the Trump children a pass for allegedly defrauding investors after they donated to his campaign, made a valiant effort to explain why he is now protecting Steinhardt from accountability:

In explaining the agreement not to prosecute so long as Mr. Steinhardt abides by all its terms, Mr. Vance said the arrangement would allow for the items to be “returned expeditiously to their rightful owners” rather than being held as evidence. It would also help his office to “shield the identity of the many witnesses here and abroad whose names would be released at any trial.”

Translation: any criminal trial would open up a whole can of writhing plutocratic worms complicit in Steinhardt's antiquities-trafficking racket. It's the same logic now being used in the Ghislaine Maxwell sex trafficking trial, where prosecutors have abruptly announced that they will be resting their case at the end of the week -  before, apparently, the names of any VIP enablers/clients/blackmail targets can get dragged through the mud. It's called going through the motions in a futile attempt to prove that Lady Justice is blind.

Steinhardt himself must know what a travesty his own case is. He actually railed against the Obama administration's own kid glove treatment of Wall Street predators after the meltdown of 2008. As Reuters reported at the time, 

 “What we really needed a long time ago was a recognition that there were villains apace. The evils of the financial system should have been recognized long before this,” said Steinhardt, who no longer manages billions of dollars but whose counsel is sought on Wall Street and among select politicians.

Steinhardt seems to have been practicing the fine art of projecting his own venality onto others. Even while preaching deficit-hawk austerity for the masses for upwards of three decades, he had been a known trafficker in stolen relics. This activity was not just pursued for the years that Vance acknowledged in his press conference, but during the entire time frame this Wall Street "luminary" was advising, donating to, and influencing politicians from both factions of the Uniparty.

 As the Times reported in its article on the agreement with Vance's office, way back 1995 a stolen golden bowl dating from 450 B.C. was seized from his home and returned to Italy, with similar confiscations and protestations of innocence and ignorance on Steinhardt's part sporadically continuing ever since.

And there was never any accountability. Only one year before the golden bowl incident, Steinhardt was then-President Bill Clinton's honored guest at a gala DLC Christmas holiday dinner. From the official transcript of Clinton's remarks:

Hillary and I are delighted to be here. I was so glad when Michael Steinhardt and Al From and Will Marshall came up on the stage. I thought we were occupying the right wing all by ourselves here tonight. [Laughter] I want to—it'll get funnier as you think about it.

 The bellies of the assorted plutocrats in attendance must have been shaking like a million golden bowls full of jelly. They were stuffing themselves with the stewed viscera of the working class and poor that the DLC (now known as New Democrats or "moderate" Centrists) have been preparing for the ultra-rich gourmands ever since, right along with their fellow chefs from the GOP.

Reward of Cruelty (William Hogarth)

In that speech, Clinton made no secret of his party's new right wing bona fides, and he also made no secret that the mass punishment of struggling people was rooted in the cult of elite rapacity. Neoliberal capitalism was, and is, an ideology. The looting, accompanied as it was by cynical calls for diversity and tolerance, was what they thought they could they could get away with. It was always about pitting "hard-working" folks against hordes of alleged loafers. The fostering of resentment kept the citizenry in line by redirecting their ire against each other and at one or another of the permitted two parties, or what Upton Sinclair described as the two right wings of one bird of prey. 

With Steinhardt no doubt beaming in approval on the stage back in 1994, Clinton delivered exactly the kind of divide and conquer stemwinder of a speech that his owners paid him to deliver. He co-opted race as a flimsy means to differentiate the two parties, using buzzwords to disguise the fact that his own reactionary policies - like welfare destruction  - were both racist and sexist to their very cores.

Well, we did a lot of things that they didn't like very much, especially after it got explained to them, as we say at home. I think I was right when I opposed discrimination and intolerance, but a lot of folks thought I was just more concerned about minorities than the problems for the majority.

And,

We believe the promise of America is equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. The Democratic Party's fundamental mission is to expand opportunity, not Government. America must remain energetically engaged in the world, not retreat from it. The United States must maintain a strong and capable defense. The right way to rebuild America's economic security is to invest in our people and to expand trade, not to restrict it. We believe in preventing crime and punishing criminals, not explaining away their behavior. The purpose of social welfare is to bring the poor into the economic mainstream, not to maintain them in dependence. Government should respect individual liberty and stay out of our private lives and personal decisions. We believe in the moral and cultural values most Americans share, individual responsibility, tolerance, work, faith, and family. We believe American citizenship entails responsibilities as well as rights. And we mean to ask our citizens to give something back to their communities and their country.

Fast forward nearly thirty years, and Joe Biden - himself one of the original founding members of the DLC - is hosting an eerily similar "democratic" global leadership conference. The main difference is that this one is directed by a predatory superpower at the rest of the world

This is the same Clintonesque administration which insists that "we" cannot afford to send cheap Covid testing kits to every household in America, but which will willingly spend a trillion dollars a year on weapons and hardware to surveil, harm, and kill people all over the globe.  It is this endless violence that enables predators like Michael Steinhardt to reap the rewards of the systemic, institutionalized rapacity that calls itself the United States of America.

Underground "tomb raiders" are not so underground anymore. They are operating right out in the open for all to see, if only we still had eyes. They're counting on everybody either fighting one another in the divide and conquer culture wars manufactured at the very top, or simply donning our Melania Trump couture and trying to ignore the depravity of the ruling class, as we struggle to survive for yet another day.

America Gets Mitch-Slapped

One of the more gleefully repulsive enforcers of our Great American Oligarchy is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. His latest act of villainy is nixing a floor vote to give modest, one-time $2,000 relief checks to people struggling to survive during the worst biologic and economic catastrophe in modern history.

Well, he is willing, but there are strings attached. Actually, there are reinforced steel chains attached. People will only get the extra money, McConnell smarmily insinuates, if the Democratic Party-aligned social media companies are made bereft of their legal protections. Some of them - namely Facebook and probably Google - already face antitrust lawsuits because they own and control the entire world, and censor content that their "deep state" Establishment partners don't like. Republicans also want them stripped of their legal protections against also getting sued for third party defamation contained in public commentary.

 McConnell is further demanding that people lose more of their voting rights through a crackdown on alleged electoral fraud. In other words, he wants the power to thwart the public will and to nullify electoral results he doesn't like by expanding voter disenfranchisement into a redefinition of American citizens as real or incipient fraudsters. 

As far as the fortunes of the coddled Silicon Valley billionaires are concerned, I say why not take them all to court at every opportunity? The liability shield protecting them was enacted way back in the 90s, long before they morphed into the monstrous undemocratic and unaccountable sovereign surveillance and data extraction states that they are today. Solve the problem by simply breaking them up.

  But McConnell's disenfranchisement gambit is a whole different story. It is not only a poison pill, it is a million-gallon cocktail of arsenic, strychnine and ricin spelling absolute and speedy doom for the body politic.

If McConnell has his way (and when hasn't he gotten his way?), then the only stimulus we'll get, on top of those seductive $600 love-taps, will be a hard, resounding and very contemptuous bitch-slap in the face.

As far as President-elect Joe Biden is concerned, he already has pre-emptively vowed never, ever to "embarrass" McConnell and his other Republican friends in public. “My leverage is, every senior Republican knows I’ve never once, ever, misled them,” he bragged to a select group of establishment journalists recently.

His leverage with the American people is, he doesn't need the American people. He has never cared whether or not we know that we are being misled because a majority of us elected him as our newest misleader.

Rarely, in fact, do the interests of the predatory pathocrats and the interests of dispossessed people align. It's about as rare an event as Jupiter and Saturn aligning in the night sky every 600 years or so. But, as spectacular a sight as Republicans and Democrats, and Wall Street and Main Street, all joining together in the common humane purpose of meaningful pandemic relief may be, it is largely an illusion. Just as to the naked eye Saturn and Jupiter seemed to be embracing in a blaze of light while 456 million miles apart, so too is the comity between politicians and their constituents, the Haves and the Have-Nots a matter of highly skewed perspective. It's hardly the dawning of a New Age of Aquarius.

But it could be a glimmer. Senator Bernie Sanders is doing his theatrical utmost to, as David Sirota describes it, not only embarrass McConnell, but "out-McConnell McConnell." He is putting a hold on the veto override vote for the defense appropriations bill (the death industry's corporate welfare package) and his bravura performance at least is forcing the Senate to stay in town for the New Year's holiday. Come 2021, the wars and the weapons profiteering will seamlessly continue as though Bernie's  filibuster never even happened.

It all comes down to the pair of Senate runoffs in the state of Georgia, culminating next Tuesday. Two plutocratic GOP grifters, who each got even richer on insider trading deals after secret Covid-19 briefings early this year, are struggling in the polls against two centrist Democrats being bankrolled by corporate interests.  For purposes of winning power, the whole quartet is championing those $2,000 relief checks. The outcome will determine whether McConnell continues to rule the Senate.

Original Check Champion Donald Trump, who these days more resembles a mutilated turkey on the golf course than a lame duck in the White House, is said by the corporate media to have "blindsided" the Duopoly with his sudden demand for the added money, after Congress had worked so hard giving ordinary people the equivalent of half a month's rent and wealthy bosses a tax break on their three-martini business lunches. The media are no longer reporting the original story, which had Trump figuratively bound and gagged by his White House minions after he called for $2,000 checks long before the midnight compromise between Republicans and Democrats was finally reached.

Despite the questionable motivations behind his sudden concern for the masses of people as he exits the White House, Trump's words are having their beneficent effect, in that they expose the political perfidy in his various bipartisan enablers. He also just shockingly ousted Barack Obama from his 12-year reign as the Gallup Poll's Most Admired Man In America. 

Miracles do happen. Illusions replace illusions. The Emperor always does have new clothes. But there will also always be outsiders to point out the naked truth to anyone who's interested in seeing or hearing it, not to mention acting upon it.

Abandon Hope, Get Out and Vote

That giant sucking sound you may or may not be hearing is the death of any second stimulus package for pandemic relief. If you're not hearing it, it's because the corporate media have chosen not to write the obituary. Besides, they're way too busy covering the tech moguls and congress critters convening remotely to argue yet again about all that horrible misinformation and disinformation and discord-sowing on the Internet. 

They're too busy to cover their own cover-up of the hard truth that our politicians have deliberately refused to help their constituents.

So, to distract you from the reality that there will be no more $1200 stimulus checks and no more enhanced unemployment benefits to help stave off hunger and eviction, the New York Times is running on its front page two side-by-by side photos of extremely well-stocked refrigerators. You are asked to guess which one is a Trump voter's and which one is a Biden voter's. There are apparently no other types of Americans who eat. There are no third party voters, no write-in voters and no abstaining voters. There are also apparently no Americans with bare refrigerators, despite the fact that at least eight million have slipped into poverty just in the few months since the pandemic aid dried up.

In case that fun fridge quiz didn't distract or satiate you, the Times is also running "The Anxious Person's Guide to the 2020 Election." Some people apparently are so jittery that they don't even know when Election Day is. Or at least the Times thinks so, because it is the very first topic on their list of existential anxieties. To further distract the anxious from their empty refrigerators and bank accounts, the Times also soothes the fears of people who can't sleep at night because they don't know what a naked ballot is. 

Nowhere on the Times front page is there any announcement that, due to the lack of agreement on a new economic package, we're all screwed until at least next month, next year, or possibly forever. 

Meanwhile, we are drowning in the third wave of the Covid pandemic. Or, according to some experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, we are still riding the first wave that is cresting again. 

It's really a tsunami of destruction for all but the extremely rich, for whom the pandemic has been a windfall. Jeff Bezos has made so many more billions from Covid that he is reportedly now trying to add CNN to his global empire, further controlling the establishment "narrative" which aims to limit and suppress all sources of independent journalism and independent thought. Increasingly, one of the main functions of establishment media, as the above two examples in Wednesday's New York Times show, is to infantilize and gaslight the news-consuming public.

We're not only flailing around in a monster wave of disease, we're caught in the undertow of reactionary political malpractice. We are crashing ashore and getting sucked back out to sea at the same time, just like in a real tsunami. No wonder we're anxious.  

A Google search of "Stimulus Bill Dead" brings up a Times article titled "Dead, Alive, or On Life Support: Confusion Reigns on Stimulus" - dating all the way back to October 8.

Only two articles from the front page of my Wednesday search -  one from Forbes and one from New York Magazine - make the straightforward announcement that the stimulus deal is completely and ignominiously dead. To make this blunt admission is as much to announce that America is a failed state only six days before the election. No wonder the voter-shaming, click-baiting Times and other outlets aren't touching this harsh reality with a ten foot pole. Headlines of "probably dead," "could be dead," "could it really be dead this time?," "not really dead," or "alive again" do nothing but paint a rosy picture and keep the audience captive as they anxiously expect their elected reps to buckle down and help them.

Meanwhile, these outlets marvel that their audience members are waiting in such record long lines to vote, without really questioning why these unconscionably long lines exist in the first place. (hint: no new federal stimulus aid to the counties, states, towns and cities responsible for keeping the polling places open and adequately staffed.)

Ed Kilgore of New York Magazine is one of the few journalists who isn't ignoring or soft-pedaling the truth and promoting false hope. He writes that "there is no reason to think a stimulus deal will be imminent even after the election, when the incentive to make voters happy will have disappeared."

Actually, they have no incentive to make us happy now, right before an election, the only time they traditionally are forced to make an effort to make us happy. They aren't even pretending to care, not even in one of those rare intervals when we are allowed to hold them accountable. Even if they lose, they win. Elected office is increasingly viewed as the stepping-stone to vast wealth and new career opportunities - on cable TV, the vast networks of corporate-funded think tanks, private equity firms, hedge funds, and good old-fashioned direct lobbying, which is now known as "consultancy" to sidestep laws barring our public officials from cashing in too quickly.

Heck, they cash in while they're still in office. Look at all the stock-dumping and insider trading that members of  Congress did when they got their secret briefings early this year about the coming pandemic. 

Maybe sometime between now and the inauguration of the next president, people will finally start recovering from their presidential horse race psychoses and begin adding the words "strike" and "new parties" to their vocabularies. 

And beating their addiction to the Times, MSNBC, CNN, Fox and the rest of the Groupthink Conglomerate by spending more time reading books and alternative media. We have to learn to evict Trump from the squatting position he's taken up in our brains, with the aid and encouragement of the establishment media. This is regardless of whether he wins or loses.

And if he does lose, we have to be vigilant lest Joe Biden puts us all to sleep with his neoliberal reasonableness and those dreaded common-sense solutions and rhetoric about rich and poor being all in this together.

The Woke-Washed and the Vote-Washed

 Neoliberal capitalism never dies, much less fades away. It just keeps right on reinventing itself and gaining strength, even as the world collapses around it.

With millions of Americans in increasingly dire straits due to the federal government's failure to provide even a modicum of renewed relief in one of the worst pandemics in human history, you'll be happy to learn that Facebook is here to help. Its billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg just ostentatiously forked over another $100 million to help keep the polls open next month,  ensuring the "safety and efficiency" of ballot-casting.

He also has recently financed a study which concludes that the way for corporations to help disabled, sick, overweight, elderly, gay, transgender, and racially marginalized people is to use more of them in their advertisements. The more that an oppressed population group can be used in commercials, the higher the profits will be for corporations like Facebook, which are absolutely loath to pay taxes that would help fund social programs and Covid relief for the people who need help the most.

Neoliberal "woke-washing" has, of course, gained a whole new head of steam since the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. It is a novel way of keeping capitalism-spawned systemic racism and record economic inequality - and the resulting social unrest - under strict control, so that the rich can get even richer as they pretend to care. The public relations message is this: it's not a living wage, guaranteed health care, food and housing that people need. It's recognition. It's either seeing others who look like you on TV and in social media ads, or it's getting the chance to appear in one of these commercials yourself to sell stuff that makes rich people and corporations even richer.

But lest you get too far ahead of yourselves, remember that your very first acting job is to vote, to elect the politicians who will help the rich get richer. Vote-shaming marketing campaigns are fine. But the Facebook CEO is going that extra mile in directly funding the election of politicians who will do Facebook's bidding. Woke-washing and vote-washing have joined forces as the most important weapons in the Zuckerberg arsenal, to defend him both against future antitrust suits and to combat the widespread criticism of Facebook's political ads and other nefarious marketing, surveillance and propaganda operations. 

As much as acknowledging that the United States is a full-fledged oligarchy, albeit one that still requires the occasional rubber stamp of legitimacy from the unwashed masses, Zuckerberg writes:

“Voting is the foundation of democracy. It's how we express our voice and make sure our country is heading in the direction we want. Priscilla and I remain determined to ensure that every state and local election jurisdiction has the resources they need so Americans can vote.”

To help nudge the country in the direction that he wants, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan had already sent $250 million  to Chicago's Center For Tech and Civic Life, before upping the ante by another hundred mil last week. This organization's board of directors is a bipartisan mix of private equity moguls, former campaign operatives, McKinsey consultants and neoliberal think tank leaders. Its executive director, Tiana Epps-Johnson, founded the Center and financed it with the help of a generous Obama Foundation "fellow" grant. She said she will use the $350 million donated by Zuckerberg to disburse Covid protective gear and extra hazard pay and hire temporary workers - aid which the Trump administration refuses to provide to help ensure that more voters show up and local elections can run more smoothly.

Joe Biden, vice president under philanthrocapitalist and media mogul Barack Obama, has been a vocal critic of Facebook. The keyword here, of course, is vocal. Because as much as they deign to remind us every four years that "we" have a voice, it's still their money that talks.

Okay, so now that you've mailed in your ballot, already voted in person or at least made a plan to vote, you can finally lean back and relax by going online to be pressed to Buy Stuff. Even if you are poor, you still can feel a little better watching people who look like you trying to sell you Stuff that you can't afford. And if you can't afford Stuff because you have no job, no savings and can't even make the rent, an acting gig in a new slew of Woke-Washing diversity commercials might just be in your future.

Facebook recently commissioned the Geena Davis Institute to conduct a survey whose results claim that 70 percent of respondents want to see more diversity in online advertising. (Geena Davis is a Hollywood actress who started the Institute after her own acting jobs dried up due to systemic ageism in the film industry. Among her corporate endeavors is the annual film festival in Bentonville, Arkansas, bankrolled by the hometown Walton billionaires of Walmart.)

The Institute's Facebook study revealed, among other shocking things, that "even though 19 percent of Americans have some sort of cognitive, emotional or physical disability, only 1.1 percent of (advertisement) characters did." 

I doubt that the mass despair engendered by Covid alone, and the government's criminal neglect of same. could possibly have factored in to these results, given that a CDC study recently revealed that a not-insignificant percentage of the US population is now so depressed as to be suicidal.

But be that as it may, for according to the Facebook press release just published in Adweek:

It’s everyone’s responsibility to speak up about bias and stereotypes. All brands have an opportunity to step up, not only through increased presence of underrepresented groups, but through portrayals that are more authentic and empowering.

And it also may lead to better business results. In a Facebook analysis, we found that campaigns with more diverse representation had a 90% likelihood to be more effective at driving ad recall compared to campaigns with single traditional representation.

Thanks to Facebook's largesse, the Geena Davis Institute study coordinator is able to conclude:

I’ve observed that not only is eliminating harmful bias in advertising the right and responsible thing to do, it can lead to better results. I’ve even seen studies showing that creative with more diverse representation can boost stock price. As a general rule, I believe what’s good for our society is good for brands!

She got it a little backwards. Because the first tenet of neoliberalism is that when something is good for brands, only then can it be deemed to benefit "society." Societal good is a marginalized person being displayed and noticed for the ultimate profit of the user. A marginalized person is mainly being valued as a commodity and a marketing tool.

Just as Madison Avenue once used only young sexy women to sell everything from cars to mouthwash, so too can the ad industry now use marginalized or "exotic" people to sell any number of products. The Institute tells Facebook exactly what the ethics-challenged Zuckerberg paid them to suggest:

 Get specific in your briefs, scripts and casting documents—include gender, race and sexual orientation. Consider using an intersectional lens even if (and especially when) it’s not related to the brand or the message of the campaign. (my bold.)

Intersectionality pays! If a transgender person is selling a Chevy, be sure to mention their identity bona fides along with the misleading mileage stats so that the audience may feel more smugly tolerant as they shop for the latest gas-guzzler.

Advertisers can even combine woke-washing and vote-washing with good old fashioned green-washing.  For example, if a physically challenged actor is shilling for Exxon-Mobil, the theme of the script can be that even disabled people have the god-given right to be an Energy Voter and breathe in the sublime air of freshly fracked gas. The subliminal message to viewers? You cannot possibly champion disabled people and support the Green New Deal at the same time. You should wash all that angry knowledge about the oil industry's criminal role in climate change right out of your brain.

The possibilities for malign oligarchic intersectionality are as stratospheric as Mark Zuckerberg's vast tax-proof wealth, and as deep as the poisoned oceans, and as unrestrained as the greedy reach of capitalism itself.

The Show Must Go On

 It's hard to believe that in just a few short weeks (if the polls are right)  Donald Trump will officially become a lame duck president. I'm already envisioning the ebullient crowds chanting, as they did outside the Bush White House when Barack Obama beat John McCain in 2008: "Na Na Hey Hey, Kiss Him Goodbye."

But I am also envisioning ultra-right militias showing up to do battle with the ephemeral Marxist/Antifa/Biden forces that supposedly are taking away all their freedoms.

The ugliness threatens to far outweigh the joy and relief that the long national nightmare of Trumpism is over. Because it won't be over. Even before he was elected thanks to the archaic Electoral College and the economic inequality of neoliberal capitalistic rule, Trumpism was always simmering just below the surface. Reversing the flood will be no easy task, and it will take a lot more than a corporate Democratic president's few token sandbags to do it.

Lame Duck Donald, if he wasn't joking at one of his recent Covid-spreading campaign rallies about fleeing the country to avoid prison, could start acting more like a high-flying reanimated Pterodactyl. He won't be going down without a fight, even if this fight doesn't include the highly prophesied legal challenges to the election result.

 Out of revenge, he would refuse to sign even a bare-bones stimulus bill that does not personally and directly benefit himself and his clan and grant him and them immunity from prosecution for all past, present and future crimes. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is no doubt correct when she claims that all he cares about, right this very minute, is his name on $1200 stimulus checks to help his re-election chances.

Post-defeat, President Duck a L'Orange will be so busy stuffing his own carcass with Treasury loot that he'll make the Clintons' alleged absconding with White House furniture and memorabilia as they left office in 2000 look even pettier than it did at the time.

The mischief that this man can still do and the violence that he will still be able to foment from his continuing position of power are incalculable. The boast that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it might even be put to the ultimate test. Would the Republicans, even assuming that they'd still barely control the Senate in January under a Biden presidency, finally help remove him from office in November or December in the interest of the survival of their own corrupt party? Because if he does lose, and loses badly, the country might not even be able to wait a few more months for his final departure.

Of course, with no pandemic relief in sight, a lame duck Congress could single-handily transform America into a virtual abattoir as Joe Biden bides his time till Inauguration Day. Who needs a sane, functional president with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnel in virtual control of both the public purse and the Republican Party? Having distanced himself from the White House after the bipartisan CARES package for the plutocracy gave him and his class everything they wanted and more, McConnell has no incentive at all to cooperate with any president, whether Democrat or Republican.

Even if Trump is ultimately tried and convicted of a crime, he will get his own reality show. "Celebrity Apprentice" will morph into "Celebrity Ex-President" or maybe "Orange Is the New Orange" filmed in a luxe Club Fed, where Trump in a jumpsuit can promote QAnon conspiracy theories to his heart's content. Stay tuned for a cable bidding war to end all bidding wars to determine where Trump decides to take his talents after he leaves Washington.

Meanwhile, whoever said that divisiveness and partisan "gridlock" are preventing our elected representatives from doing anything for the public good should ponder this grisly image:

That's maskless ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein giving a "full body hug" last week to maskless Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham after the Duopoly, at the behest of polluting Dark Money, successfully rammed through Amy Coney Barrett's Supreme Court nomination for a full body vote. They were congratulating themselves on the awesome civility with which they stabbed the body politic right in the back. Or maybe it was the skill with which they attached the silencer to the assault rifle aimed at America, allowing one more right-wing jurist to avoid answering even the most basic and pressing existential questions, including whether she "believes" in the capitalism-engendered climate change destroying all forms of life on Earth.

 How do we explain this oligarchic merry-go-round, these endless variations on one grotesque theme?

 Let us at least try to count the ways: 

 

Fun and Games at the Apocalypse

When Donald Trump first began ranting against the WHO, I thought he was talking about the legendary rock band and its socialist frontman Roger Daltrey, and not the World Health Organization. I mean, who in their right mind would ever rail against the World Health Organization right in the middle of a pandemic?

Well, eminently sane sociopath that he is, Trump is simply trying to deflect attention from his own bungled and belated response to the Covid-19 plague. His rationale, which like most propaganda does contain a grain or two of truth, is that the WHO had initially taken China's word for it that it had the outbreak under total control and not to worry. Taking a page verbatim from the classic authoritarian playbook, Trump himself proceeded to fly in the face of all fact, claiming that the crisis is under his total and absolute control, and not to worry.

And that got me thinking back to my original mistaken impression about exactly WHO Trump had been really ranting against. One of the rock band's biggest hits was Teenage Wasteland - which does sort of describe Trump's cabinet of sycophants and trust fund kiddies, including his very own Jared and Ivanka.  And that hit song in its own turn got me thinking that T.S. Eliot's famous line in The Wasteland has never been more apt. April is indeed the cruelest month.

Congress cruelly ignored the pain and suffering of the masses while it allowed the Fed to secretly give trillions of dollars of public money to oligarchs and corporations under the grotesquely named CARES Act. They govern neither in prose nor in poetry. As far as they're concerned, the initials T.S. might as well stand for for Tough Shit. You're on your own, proles. Tighten your belts and share the sacrifice.

And even as they turn the screws, they pretend to be aghast that some of the $1200 "stimulus" checks will be delayed because Trump has insisted that the Treasury affix his own name to them. He had originally wanted to sign them himself. So terribly, terribly shocking to all those who cling to their norms and cynical acronyms.

But it could always be worse. Trump could have insisted on sending out fake Monopoly money with his picture on it, as contained in his own cheesy version of the Depression-era board game.

 Unfortunately, the initial groups of recipients will not receive Trump's limited edition collectors' checks, because they will get the funds electronically, by direct deposit.

The people to receive the paper checks are among the country's neediest and most marginalized  -  that is, if they ever receive the money at all. They first have to locate a computer with a connection in order to access the Treasury's internet portal to apply to be last in line for the money. They also have to provide a physical address. And with so many poor people facing evictions (if they are not already homeless) both internet access and existence in a physical building are insurmountable barriers for them, even in the best of the worst of times.

Too many people with no money and no jobs had already lost their modest Baltic Avenue homes back in 2009, when Barack Obama bailed out the banks and enabled the same criminal bankers to fraudulently foreclose on millions of mortgages before renting the plundered property back out to the evictees at exorbitant rates. And the people, still lectured they have to be in the neoliberal game to win it, just keep right on landing on Boardwalk and Park Place, and told that they can never, ever pass GO. 

But since the masses must continue to be entertained lest they emerge from Lockdown and riot in the streets, we now come to the long awaited sequel to that classic buddy comedy, The Three Amigos.

Because two of its leading men have a well-known "frosty but cordial relationship" and the third marquee actor is given very few lines of his own, and because the plot also has an element of horror to offset the treacle, the movie's working title is Bernie and Biden and Barry, Oh My!

The opening scene has Bernie Sanders juxtaposed with a near-aphasic Joe Biden. The Vermont senator urges his supporters to "come together" and vote for his good friend. In case you don't get the message, Bernie's side of the schizophrenic screen bears a prominent "Biden For President" logo.

The Revolution is cancelled. Long Live the Elite Task Forces!

In a subsequent interview with the Associated Press, Bernie Sanders goes even further and as much as calls his supporters traitors if they do not vote for Joe Biden. The Revolution is cancelled. Long live the corporate Democratic Party voter-shaming!

The next scene has Barack Obama appearing solo from an undisclosed location. Some say he's holed up at his Washington mansion working on his memoirs, while others speculate he's social-distance partying at his sprawling Martha's Vineyard oceanfront estate. But since this is, after all, nothing but a movie, my guess is the setting was the famous $35 million Shark House in Hollywood, where the Obamas reportedly stay whenever they're in town to perform their Netflix and Democratic fund-raising duties. (Joe apparently needs tons of money to catch up with Monopoly Man.) Discreet predator that he is, though, Barry filmed his endorsement of Biden in front of the standard anodyne photos and knick-knacks rather than in front of one of the home's built-in shark tanks.

The audience cannot be expected to absorb more than one stingray or electric eel at a time, can they?

And Obama doesn't get top billing in The Three Amigos for nothing. His acting skills and his timing are as slick as they ever were.

Anybody can deliver a political endorsement speech. But only an Obama can actually pull off smirking a political endorsement speech. He can barely restrain his own cynical grin as he praises the miracle of millions of newly jobless people still being able to enjoy their expensive employer-based health insurance right in the middle of a pandemic.

Warning: the following scene is not recommended for sensitive viewers:

 Since every disaster comedy buddy flick must have a leading lady - and every revolution needs its Marie Antoinette - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is here to add her own nurturing feminine touch, straight from her luxury vineyard estate outside of San Francisco.

  Are you hungry because the grocery shelves are bare and you don't have any money anyway? All you need to survive quarantine and fend off disease is a wildly expensive stainless steel restaurant-grade freezer. Nancy says that you, too, can order one straight from the Internet and then stock it with a small fortune in designer ice cream.

Let them eat Haagen-Dazs! The all-American brand might sound Danish, but forget Nordic-style single payer health care. The confection that Nancy Pelosi favors is pure American capitalism. "We're capitalists. That's just the way it is."

In other words: T.S.

As Eliot  wrote in The Wasteland: "I think we are in rats' alley/Where the dead men lost their bones."

  “What is that noise?”
                          The wind under the door.
“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”
                           Nothing again nothing.
                                                        “Do
“You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember nothing?

Laughs and Loathing In Las Vegas

Given that a New York jury is currently deliberating the fate of Harvey Weinstein, Mike Bloomberg certainly picked a bad night to utter the words "women" and "consensual" in the same nasal breath.

 Weinstein's defense against rape charges is that it was consensual sex. Bloomberg's defense of the nondisclosure agreements related to his serial workplace misogyny ("Jokes I told") is that the gagging of women was also consensual. These gals, Bloomberg insinuated, loved every minute of his smothering legalities. So no, he will never release them from their lingering pleasurable bondage.

It remains to be seen whether the thousands of ads playing every single minute all around Bloombergville USA will offset his dismal debate performance. He seemed hell-bent not so much on winning the nomination and the presidency, but on winning the Oscar for his wizened, whining live-action portrayal of Mr. Burns. 

"Portrayal" is kind of a stretch, because the godzillionaire former mayor became stone cold dead on his feet once Elizabeth Warren got through with him.

Just the clip of him rolling his eyes in bored disdain as she destroyed him should be enough to ruin his candidacy. Then again, there are those nonstop ubiquitous ads costing him an estimated $3000 a minute just in local TV markets alone, the hundreds of millions of dollars of his personal fortune being spent on bribing politicians and super-delegates and cable TV executives and journalists and paying off the country's entire stable of consultants, pollsters, PR flacks and caterers. At the rate that his vast fortune is consuming all the "talent," the least he can do is endow a graduate program in Electoral Chicanery at Harvard to keep churning out the elite entrepreneurs of the future.

Elizabeth Warren did Bernie Sanders a huge favor by going after Bloomberg, while only making soft murmuring complaints when the NBC moderators baited her with the Bernie Bro trope. As for Bernie himself, red-baited from both the right and the center, his theory that a couple of his online supporters might even be linked to "Russian interference" made me roll my own eyes in dismay. But I suppose we should be grateful that at long last, Sanders did not once preface an answer with "So-and-so is a good friend of mine."

Since his good friend Joe Biden is already a political corpse, nobody even bothered to call out his breathtaking hypocrisy when he scolded Bloomberg over his racist Stop and Frisk crusade. Biden's authorship of the racist Crime Bill set the stage long ago for Bloomberg's own ethnic cleansing ("gentrification") campaign. As recently as Obama's second term, the former vice president was leading the charge for more cops on the street and more high tech military hardware of the type used against the citizens of Ferguson, MO when they became upset over the police killing of Michael Brown. The fact that immigration activists loudly disrupted his closing argument was barely even mentioned in mainstream media debate narratives this morning.

Given that billionaire Tom Steyer was missing from the stage, centrists Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar got more generous time to snipe at one another while urging everybody else to stop fighting so as to beat Donald Trump and magically "bring the country together."  What do you call it when two annoying, cloying centrists cancel each other out - besides its being a very refreshing sight to behold?

I've gone from dismay to delight that Bloomberg successfully bribed his way on to the debate stage. People finally got a look at him without the protective gauze of his glitzy TV commercials. They're also getting a much-needed true picture of the hordes of liberal politicians who have fallen all over themselves to endorse him in exchange for his "philanthropy." He has shown once and for all that not only can he not beat Trump, he is simply a more urbane, nasal,annoying - and dangerous - version of Trump. He is Trump without the stand-up comedy talent.

If Bloomberg is anointed the nominee in the second ballot of a contested convention - or worse, if he is simply the stalking horse for a third Hillary Clinton run -  it will spell the final and long-overdue demise of the Democratic Party and perhaps even usher in the long-overdue street actions and revolts and strikes that this country so sorely needs. It would likely be the smallest turnout in modern electoral history.

Even if Bernie Sanders does win the presidency, moreover, the corporate Democrats will have no other choice but to show whose side they are really on as they thwart his every reasonable executive action.

Thanks to Michael Bloomberg, reality in all its ugliness is finally getting a fair shake and a fair hearing. The rotten center cannot hold.