The Contrived Dichotomy of Power Politics

As much as I've tried to ignore the hype, it has become near- impossible to avoid the media-manufactured reality that Decision '24 is now officially underway. It's hard, because the first Republican primary debate tonight is being marketed as a blockbuster double bill. Or more accurately, it's a teaser for the much more thrilling show of Donald Trump and his racket getting booked on yet more criminal charges. Seeing as how Trump is skipping the debate, his fans will likely also skip the debate in favor of a third big draw - the rumored Tucker Carlson interview.  The target audience for the actual debate itself are the Democrats, who are reported to be getting the popcorn and the booze ready in anticipation of just how boring and out of touch Ron DeSantis will be, and how many zingers Chris Christie will manage to lob, and how many of the candidates will visibly squirm when asked if they will sign a loyalty oath to support the ultimate victor (who, by popular polling and media acclaim is said to be the absent Donald Trump.) The mainstream media outlets are rife with articles about all the complicated different ways that your captive eyeballs can glue themselves to the Fox show - not to mention all the takeaways to be had from doing your civic duty of watching it, and then listening to rival cable channels analyzing it to death into the wee, bleak hours of Thursday morning and beyond.

The more I think about it, the more I doubt that the general election will, in fact, be a contest between Trump and Joe Biden. Trump looks more bloated and pasty by the day. He is spending all his political contributions on his own legal defense. His only campaign theme is martyrdom. The phony appeal to the working stiff is running a sloppy second. 

And between the Hunter mess and his own visibly deteriorating mental and physical state, Joe Biden will be lucky to outlast even his first term in office. The establishment media, which had breathlessly reported on his visit to Maui, went into radio silence mode in the wake of the actual visit. If you wanted to find out that Biden actually compared hundreds of people losing their lives to the worst United States fire in more than a century to a minor kitchen fire decades ago in his Delaware home, when -no joke - he nearly lost his wife, his cat, and his vintage Corvette, then you had to read about it in the New York Post or The Daily Mail. The New York Times abruptly stopped its own Biden-Maui coverage after a last photo of the president waving from Air Force One en route to Hawaii. Meanwhile, they are oh so subtly boosting the hapless Kamala Harris and keeping Gavin Newsom on 24-hour call. Little by little, they seem to be giving up on their Philip K. Dick simulacrum of a president. He's winding down, creaking to a halt, and painfully so. It's a case of political elder abuse if there ever was one. Dianne Feinstein is still around, in part because she serves to make Biden seem spry.

As a matter of fact, the Times coverage of the Maui catastrophe already had been taking second place to the Trump indictment, and which unknown GOP politician had just made the donation/polling cut for the debate. One of them, I forget his name, apparently got hurt in a basketball game and may or may not appear.  This news is interspersed with breaking news accounts of which Trump racketeer has had his or her mug shot taken in Georgia.

To the extent that the corporate media are covering such news as that food insecurity in the richest country on earth has increased for the fifth straight month, or squeamishly euphemizing the mass expulsion of millions of Medicaid recipients from their health care as "the Great Unraveling" rather than eugenics on steroids, or is downplaying the surge  of still more coronavirus strains in an increasingly strained denial that many more people are getting sick, you'd be pretty hard-pressed to learn about these things even if you're a stalwart doom-scroller of approved news sites. Read the comments section of any Times article trying to convince you that catching Covid, and catching it often, is actually good for your immune system. The definition of "mild" has been upgraded to anything that doesn't kill you within a week. And even then, you will be said to have died "with" Covid, not of it. New public health emergencies will be declared over your dead bodies, if not theirs. 

It's all Trump all the time if your reading is restricted to consolidated Democratic Party-aligned media. It's all Biden scandal all the time if you're more inclined toward the right-leaning outlets. Personally, I always sample everything out there.

Everything is centered on all this divisiveness that has supposedly reached such new epidemic proportions. The sub-headline in an otherwise good Times article on the health and financial effects of the Palestine, Ohio train disaster is that residents have allegedly returned to a "newly divided community." The contrived dichotomy of partisan politics must always take precedence over human solidarity, which is very threatening to the powers-that-be. 

If you consider yourself a lefty and you take too much issue with the Democrats, you're either a closet Trump supporter yourself or you are propelling others into a Trumpian orbit of doom. You could even be a Putin plant if you're anti-war.  You can preface your Biden or anti-military critiques with all the Trump disclaimers you want, and it still won't matter. If you raise your voice and persist on harping on Medicare For All, then all you will succeed in doing is ushering in a reprise of fascist rule under Donald Trump or one of his imitators. Think, for example, of Mike Pompeo,  or some other more intelligent version of Trump. Or don't even take the trouble to think, because Victoria Nuland, the newly appointed acting undersecretary of state under Biden was also a protegee of Dick Cheney.

Because of course, we already live under fascism in this country. Bertram Gross wrote about it a long time ago in his book "Friendly Fascism." So did Sheldon Wolin with his critique of "inverted totalitarianism." It's also known as corporatism, or rule by predatory capitalists. Its appeals to patriotism and nationalism may vary in intensity depending on the party in power, but it transcends all the usual geographical boundaries, which are artificially put in place by the same corporatists in every single one of their bloody climate-destroying wars for endless profit.

Getting you to fight with your neighbors and even with your family members over allegiance to one of the two US-based corporations known as legacy political parties is exactly what they want. It's their weapon on of mass distraction, so you won't focus over-much on your lack of medical care, a livable income, secure housing or a lifetime of education debt. Keeping your focus off their relentless exploitation of humanity is of the utmost importance to them. Heaven forfend that you would expend whatever physical or mental energy ou still have in organizing a labor or rent strike, or a patient-led occupation of a private equity-owned clinic or hospital.

Howard Zinn had it right when he said it's not who's sitting in the White House (or spieling on a Fox News  "debate" stage)  that should concern us, but who is out there marching or sitting in the streets or any number of semi-public spaces.

It's Always Darkest Right Before the Dawn of the Dead.

 It seems like it was only a month ago that the undertakers of the Democratic Industrial Complex (DIC) were lowering shuffling old Joe Biden into his political grave before his body was even cold. 

But to prove that even moribund presidents can become reanimated zombies, the DIC-heads in the White House and their media scribes have suddenly changed the plot - they unearthed Joe Biden right out of the plot. They've transformed Joe Biden into a "bad-ass" monster named Dark Brandon. 

It's apparently meant as self-deprecating parody of the "Let's Go Brandon" pejorative  beloved of Trump fans ever since a crowd yelled "F--- Joe Biden" at Talladega Super Speedway last October. A TV commenter interviewing winner Brandon Brown had lamely tried to convince viewers that the crowd was really cheering for the athlete rather than cursing out the president.

Some bright DIC-heads unleashed the Dark Brandon persona on the world as an arch means to turn the insult right on its head. Manufactured legend has it that the Biden character is scaring whole audiences full of Republicans to death. Word has it that they're even vomiting in the aisles. Shorn of his aviator sunglasses,  Biden's newly revealed squinting red eyes are lasers blasting straight down into their soulless hypocritic innards, leaving them writhing in pain and whimpering for mercy.

Or, so the cheesy DIC narrative goes.

Now, if the monstrous Dark Brandon character reminds you of an aging Hellboy without the antlers and also happens to scare or at least nauseate you, your kids, your grandkids and your nervous Aunt Tillie, that is just necessary collateral damage in this virtual war for the democratic soul of our nation You simply must get in the spirit of DIC fun. Because despite all his loathsomeness, this is no demon from hell, people. This is the new, improved, "feisty" Joe Biden.

 According to the HuffPo, his reincarnation as Dark Brandon has millions of diehard DIC-heads all over the land thrilled in only the best of all possible worlds kind of way. If you can't beat a cartoon villain like Donald Trump with your misinformative anti-disinformation campaigns, then you might as well join him. You might as well throw all caution to the wind and turn electoral politics  into the full-bore monster movie franchise it always was anyway. 

  Imagine, if you will, the shuffling brain-dead lead zombie in Dawn of the Dead  suddenly turning into a "bad-ass" superhero right before your disbelieving eyes. Once only capable of sputtering out one gaffe or non sequitur after the other,  Dark Brandon has developed the preternatural ability to fire off pithy one-liners about rich people and their tax breaks in one breath, and in the next tell a room full of rich donors that Trump Republicans are "semi-fascists."

No matter that Dark Brandon didn't explain why they're only half-fascists and not whole ones. Because his blazing eyes and his fiery words slammed into the elite audience like a semi going a thousand miles an hour. The well-heeled patrons at that exclusive screening were reported to be shocked right into opening their wallets, if only to immunize themselves from insult, zombie virus - or god forbid, Biden threatening them with higher taxes.

 Former Obama communications director Dan Pfeiffer was so impressed with the new character, that his reliable stock of weasel words failed him. He was reduced to tweeting out: 

Notice that Bad-Ass Biden is not cursing his  rich donors and that he is only extending his index finger rather than the dreaded middle one. This edgy version of the meme actually communicates reassurance to the ruling class, lest they be fearful of getting parted from some of their cash against their will. Just because the propaganda about Biden has changed doesn't mean that anything else will. He did promise them that nothing affecting their coddled lives would ever fundamentally change.

Therefore, they shouldn't fret overmuch about his careful semi-forgiveness of student loans for a selected percentage of America's debt slaves. Because knocking $10,000 or as much as $20,000 off their debt is merely a band-aid over a gaping wound. The borrowers will continue to suffer and pay, while the rich themselves will never feel a thing. That's because the lower classes are being pitted against each other in yet another variation of the Divide and Conquer method which has always kept the rich wealthy and the powerful jn power. Non-grads will be instructed to resent the grads or the semi-grads for getting tossed a few extra pennies. They will not be urged to resent the for-profit colleges and the investors in the for-profit colleges - the real culprits in this overrated scam.

My advice? Pick an aisle seat close to an exit, and whatever you do, don't buy any more of their stale, dry, overpriced popcorn.

The Political Play Is Literally The Thing

Poster From John Carpenter's The Thing

Because despite all the suspense and the horror and the shape-shifting and the gaslighting, our current crew of political actors are discovering to their great chagrin that there is a limit to the times that you can remake a smash hit and create a franchise, and still expect people to show up at the box office to gawk and tremble and purchase the merch.

Even Dick Cheney playing a rehabbed Darth Vader at the January Sixth Capitol extravaganza, and even Nancy Pelosi piping in ditties from the cast of the neoliberal Broadway hit Hamilton to paper over her crass championship of congressional insider trading, did not garner the ratings and the rave reviews the producers obviously intended and fully expected. 

Joe Biden, plain-speaking actor that he fancies himself to be, had already addressed the reality of the elites' declining ratings a few years ago during his campaign for the White House. He acknowledged the truth of The Thing to be self-evidently apparent. 

 But despite that brief moment of candor, he still made a great big show this week of marching to the Capitol to pretend to be "fighting for" the right of every American to score food and water from their fellow citizens while standing in long lines to vote. Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema managed to steal top cinematic billing from his latest role, as she histrionically pretended to hate the same filibuster reform that Biden now pretends to love Not even his shout-out to dead racist Senator Strom Thurmond at his Georgia performance earlier in the week swayed Sinema to change her mind or her script. And why would it, when even the supporting cast and crew of what the late Glen Ford dubbed the Black Misleadership Class boycotted Biden's performance? 

Striving mightily nonetheless to perform his trademark down-home candor while admitting that mail-in ballots and food and water for waiting voters are GOP mountains far too high for him and the Democrats to climb, Biden plaintively remarked at the end of his truncated Capitol cameo part that "the honest to God answer is I don’t know whether we can get this done."

But actors must do what actors must do, and summoning up his very best Jimmy Stewart Mr. Smith Goes to Washington impression, Biden raised it to the next decibel and growled “As long as I’m in the White House, as long as I’m engaged at all, I’m going to be fighting.”

Are the Oscar nominations already a done deal, and I'm too late to register to vote? Oh, wait... mere audience members are not allowed to vote in the Oscar elections. Elites not only have weighted votes in "democratic" elections, they also have exclusive votes when it comes to nominating one another's theatrical performances. That goes not only for people employed in the movie business, but for the financiers of the movie business. Here's looking at you, Jeff Bezos, who pays no personal income tax but just donated a hefty sum to help construct the Chicago shrine of that consummate political actor, Barack Obama.

But all hope should not be abandoned. Because it is the Republicans, of all the villains in the annals of performative villainy, that just announced that they will no longer participate in the quadrennial spectacular known as the Presidential Debates. Of course, they are probably planning a whole series of alternate entertainments in the slasher genre that promise to be a lot more horrific and profitable than those boring affairs we're so tired of sitting through. Whatever the form of Campaign 2024, it will be a real Thing, what late critic Roger Ebert called "a great barf bag of a movie."

Speaking of ennui and nausea, Bill and Hillary Clinton reportedly are not only bored with being pariahs, but they smell the anemic Biden blood in the water and are planning a comeback. According to Politico, they are especially heartened that the latest "American Crime Story" season, depicting the Lewinsky scandal, did not get big ratings. Perhaps it was because the series was aired on a subscription channel, and the proles are already maxed out on inflated rent and food bills?

But here's The Thing, or as Joe Biden riffs on and on about it ad infinitum, Here's The Deal, Folks.  The horror show will end only when we stop buying tickets for the privilege of helplessly gawking at whatever capitalistic life-forms that The Thing is currently mutating into and at the same time to resist being assimilated into its maw. The Thing that the political-media-military-carceral-surveillance complex is selling is nothing more and nothing less than fear itself.

We just have to stop being awed by political performers and their stale narratives. Instead, we might take a tip from the simultaneously cruel and egalitarian Aztec civilization and, as recounted by the late David Graeber and David Wengrow in their riveting new book "The Dawn of Everything," we should subject all aspiring and de facto elected officials to an acid test involving "fasting, sleep deprivation, blood-letting and a strict regime of moral instruction."

We should implement a Dick Cheney reverse torture regimen on their sorry selves. Psychological, of course. Maybe do a little enhanced interrogation at least.

"Clearly, taking up office in this indigenous democracy required personality traits very different to those we take for granted in modern electoral politics," the "Dawn" authors observe in dry understatement about the Aztec proles.

Just imagine Joe Biden, Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi being forced to relinquish their faltering theatrical careers for a long stint in political rehab and public self-abnegation as the only way to prove to the audience just how sincere they really are, and how much they truly feel our pain. Actually doing the right thing as opposed to being seen as doing the right thing should be a requirement for everyone entering public service, and a litmus test for staying in their positions once chosen. The goal should not be the acquisition of power, but rather the privilege of representation. No wonder the corporate press hates this book.

The mere thought of these miscreants having to publicly flagellate themselves in front of the cameras in order to prove their bona fides makes me feel better already. It makes me feel like torturing them, if only rhetorically, for yet another day.

War On Earth, Bad Vibes To Humans

 For one brief shining moment this past weekend, the New York Times broke out of its role as establishment mouthpiece and publicist for the powerful, and practiced some real journalism. 

"Hidden Pentagon Records Reveal Patterns of Failure In Deadly Airstrikes" was the banner headline of the two-part blockbuster written by Azmat Khan.  Of course, euphemizing the US government's decade-long campaign of drone terror and mass murder of civilians in the middle East as a tactical "failure" is the very essence of Timesianism.

Still, it's the body of the two-part piece, based upon a five-year-long investigation by the Times - including successful Freedom of Information lawsuits for Pentagon records, visits by reporters to the cratered, ruined physical sites of the atrocities, and interviews with survivors - that should be horrifying all who read it, and more than enough to call Congress back into session to start a full investigation and a full public airing of the smoking gun evidence of some of the worst war crimes in all of recorded history.

Khan writes, 

The trove of documents — the military’s own confidential assessments of more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties, obtained by The New York Times — lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.

The documents show, too, that despite the Pentagon’s highly codified system for examining civilian casualties, pledges of transparency and accountability have given way to opacity and impunity. In only a handful of cases were the assessments made public. Not a single record provided includes a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action. Fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made, even though many survivors were left with disabilities requiring expensive medical care. Documented efforts to identify root causes or lessons learned are rare.

The air campaign represents a fundamental transformation of warfare that took shape in the final years of the Obama administration, amid the deepening unpopularity of the forever wars that had claimed more than 6,000 American service members. The United States traded many of its boots on the ground for an arsenal of aircraft directed by controllers sitting at computers, often thousands of miles away. President Barack Obama called it “the most precise air campaign in history.”

This was the promise: America’s “extraordinary technology” would allow the military to kill the right people while taking the greatest possible care not to harm the wrong ones.

Sadly, though, the timing of the Times in finally choosing to report what outlets like the Bureau of Investigative Journalism were writing about a decade ago was way, way off. Within 24 hours of publication, the war crimes blockbuster was knocked off the top of the digital front page by the utterly shocking news that Joe Manchin was finally done playing with the dead mouse known as the Build Back Better bill. It must be a bit of a relief that the elite movers and shakers and opinion-makers can ignore the mass drone slaughter so smoothly bragged about by Barack Obama, and instead direct all their news-cycle ire against the Democratic Party's latest designated Bad Cop. Manchin had the nerve not only to totally blindside the hapless and lackadaisical and totally complicit Biden, but to go on Fox News, of all places, to make the Big Reveal!

So Biden (who, to his credit, has reportedly greatly decreased the drone murders of innocents abroad) will react by seeming to reverse course and promising to deliver rapid Covid tests to every American household, without people having to go through a predatory insurance middleman after all! Not only that, he has also scored himself a brand new adorable  puppy named Commander.  Heartwarming story upon heartwarming story will make people forget all about their evictions, the resumption of their student loan payments and their lost paychecks due to the increasing number of ad hoc business closures resulting from the Fourth Wave of the pandemic.

Speaking of waves, unindicted war criminal Barack Obama was spotted cavorting in them, just as the big Times story broke, on his annual holiday vacation in Hawaii.

As the Times series on the drone slaughters and their coverups establishes - in case after case after gruesome case -  there has never been any accountability. Any accountability is reserved for the exposers of war crimes, like Julian Assange and Daniel Hale, the former drone operator who was sentenced last June to 45 months in prison for the crime of leaking documents on war crimes to the press - the same kind of documents that the Times now finally sees fit to print, to little or no reaction from either the political class or from the rest of the corporate media. I guess everybody's too busy tweeting about their "mild" Omicron test results while gaslighting the unvaxxed.

Here, meanwhile, is my published response to the Times war crimes story:

As Smedley Butler observed, war is a racket. And as long as members of Congress are among the racketeers, keeping their jobs by providing their districts with military bases, weapons and bomb-manufacturing plants and jobs, and all the countless other perks associated with global, institutionalized terrorism and death, these politicians will never hold their uniformed, hideously be-medaled partners in crime accountable for the atrocities.

What this country needs is another antiwar movement. Easier said than done, of course, given the end of the military draft and the transformation of fighting forces into flying predator and Reaper drones.

At the very least, we should be able to extend our newfound anti-racist "wokeness" to the essential racism that is inherent in all of this slaughter. As Judith Butler has observed, these casualties of war - demeaned as collateral damage and "mistakes that were made" by the generals - amount to deaths that are not deemed to be grievable. No surprise that the US has refused to become a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which is designed to bring justice to war criminals. In fact, Congress even passed a law that any US official arrested overseas on war crimes charges must be rescued by any means necessary. They don't even try to cloak the consciousness of their own guilt.

Revelations as published here should at least put pressure on the Biden administration to drop the charges against Julian Assange.

Well, since I wrote that comment a few days ago, Biden has announced that he is sending everybody in America a free nasal swab, calling out the troops to administer more shots, and showing off his new puppy. So let us all hold our collective breaths while we still have the breath to hold.

The Mangling Munching Manchin Machine

(Say three times fast)

Just like clockwork, the Democrats are out in coordinated force, blaming sexism and xenophobia as the core occult reasons for the opposition to party operative Neera Tanden's confirmation to the Biden cabinet.

Granted, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia is full of noxious hot air when he points to the "incivility" of Tanden's thousands of vitriolic deleted tweets, aimed both at Republicans and progressive Democrats in the Bernie Sanders wing, as his reason for not voting for her to lead the Office of Management and Budget.  In tandem with that nonsense, he apparently believes that it is the very height of civility to deny his own constituents, living in one of the poorest areas of the country, a rise in the minimum wage to 15 lousy bucks.

So while Republicans (and Manchin) are crying their crocodile tears and claiming they are victims of Tanden's Mean Girl Syndrome (because they only want unity!), the Democrats are perfectly willing to forgo legitimate criticism of her corruption in order to defend her. When you have identity politics to fall back on, the sky is the absolute limit when it comes to glossing over such inconvenient facts as Tanden's call to attack Libya to get at its oil, her past efforts to destroy Social Security and Medicare, her red-baiting of any and all critics of neoliberalism and Hillary Clinton, her leadership of a Democratic slush fund disguised as a think tank (Center For American Progress, or CAP) , her acceptance of corporate bribes from billionaires and corporations to run said slush-tank, her physical assault of a former employee, and her destruction of a blog run out of CAP offices once employees began to unionize.

This is the woman that Joe Biden cynically proposes to control the purse strings of our country and to manage our lives in the process. It is a scary scenario, to put it mildly.

So it is all the more disheartening when even progressive stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez leap on the Identity Politics bandwagon in order to defend the bullying Tanden against that traitorous bullying misogynistic villain Joe Manchin. AOC actually helps to ridiculously lump Tanden in with two other more liberal endangered Biden nominees, Hispanic Xavier Becerra and Native American Deb Haaland, as a way to further paper over Tanden's despicable career.

We are supposed to believe that just because Indian-American Neera Tanden once survived on food stamps and lived in public housing, she will suddenly divert from career script and champion poor people. In an absolute subversion of the mantra of Martin Luther King Jr., we are asked to judge Tanden based solely upon the color of her skin and the configuration of her XX chromosomes, rather than upon the content of her truly rotten character.

The glossy veneer barely disguising all kinds of corruption and the record inequality which is carefully engineered and maintained by the political class and its partners in consolidated media is a very flimsy substitute for legislation in the public interest, run by true public servants rather than by the career-climbing servants of the oligarchy.

Witness, just as the latest example of this performance art, Monday night's candlelight vigil spectacular starring Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to mark the 500,000 American deaths from Covid-19. Media reviewers have glowingly called their tasteful tableau such a powerful and refreshing step up from Donald Trump's own criminal callousness.

Because there's nothing like a shiny solemn candlelight vigil to substitute for a single payer health care system, regular Covid relief checks, and student debt forgiveness, right? 

Because things that help ordinary people are treated by the permanent ruling class as veritable plagues against free market capitalism. The body politic, to our leaders, is itself nothing but a Mean Girl calling them nasty names and hurting their feelings, when all they want is Unity and Civility. Harrumph!

Mangling Joe Manchin, meanwhile, dutifully plays his own designated role as the bad cop/useful idiot who prevents the noble and empathetic Joe Biden from completing his incremental agenda. Not formally defecting to the Republican side of the duopoly is simply a clever bargaining chip on Manchin's part, of course. He can dangle the threat of defection over their heads for the duration of his tenure, in the process giving his co-conspirators all the cover they need to implement their occult austerian agenda as they hide beneath their candle-lit masks of beneficence.

Just as the Tea Party Republicans once thwarted Barack Obama's hideous "Grand Bargain" with former House Speaker John Boehner to cut Medicare and Social Security, so too are right-wingers thwarting Neera Tanden's big career move to chief crook and budget-slasher. Sometimes you just have to pick your crooks and decide which bad guys you want to root for, to give you the slightest serendipitous bit of respite from the munching maw of neoliberalism.

Mangling Manchin may end up accomplishing some good in spite of his horrid old self. Then again, he could make a deal with Biden, who might agree to trash his minimum wage promise in exchange for Manchin changing his mind on Tanden.

As the New York Times frames the saga in its own extended mangled metaphor of an article, the White House is still "giving her confirmation a shot" while Tanden herself is "committed to rolling up her sleeves." Ouch.

It is so essential to remain vigilant as we're relentlessly regaled by these never-ending vigils, produced so carefully for our relief and stupefaction.

Impeachment In a Can

For one brief shining moment on Saturday, the Trump show trial actually threatened to turn into the real deal, with testimony from real human witnesses to enhance the speeches. The disturbing film footage of the Capitol riot, complemented by Trump's own spittle-inflected incitement voiceover, should have been a prima facie case for unanimous conviction. But that would have meant that the acquitting GOP senators' own lust for power and fear of Trump took second place to meting out justice.

Then, just as suddenly as the Democratic impeachment managers moved to extend Impeachment 2.0 into a case that even the most hardened Republican would be forced to squirm through, they folded. It seems that the Senators of both sides of the Duopoly have so much love in their hearts that they simply could not bear to miss Valentine's Day at home. Also, with such a prolonged exercise in justice that human witnesses and other supplementary evidence would entail, Joe Biden would be thwarted from his sublime reaching across the aisle and making friendly deals with some of the same 47 GOP senators who had just voted to acquit Donald Trump, giving their tacit stamp of approval to an attempted coup.

Now, to be fair, an extension of the trial would also have opened the door for Republicans to call their own witnesses. Nancy Pelosi, for example, would have been raked over the coals, forced to answer why she didn't request beefed up police protection for her members on that fateful day, despite plenty of warnings of mob violence. It also would have opened up the dreaded Hunter Biden can of worms.

Therefore, the public is being asked to empathize with the Democrats' political dilemma and to actually believe that justice will eventually prevail once the Dems get around to congressional investigations into the insurrection - after of course, they pass Covid relief, accomplish immigration reform, address the climate catastrophe and "do" health care.

In other words, politicians on both sides of the aisle will give each other cover as they try keep their respective rancid cans of worms glued firmly shut until they finally rust and crumble into the memory hole of nothingness.

 And meanwhile, the media will do its own part of making the story about all the "breakout stars" of Impeachment Theater, and how the show trial was, at its very essence, their audition for higher office.

"Though impeachment is an inherently political process," as Politico dishes in a piece about the latest manufactured group of rising stars to entertain and seduce and distract the viewing public,"elected officials typically don't like to admit that working as a manager can come with electoral benefits. They were required to walk a careful line when making the case that Trump incited a mob at the U.S. Capitol. Still, strategists from both sides of the aisle acknowledged their roles likely furthered their careers."

Not that the legacy stars didn't also have their moment in the sun. Nancy Pelosi theatrically "crashed" the post-acquittal press conference of Democratic impeachment managers to deliver yet another bravura performance of a "scathing" indictment of Republican cowards, while demurring that "it had not been my intention to come for this press availability."

Since the show must always go on, the national corporate media are either already camped out at Mar-a-Lago or en route in order to cover the widely anticipated opening act of Donald Trump's Revenge Tour  Refusing to cover him is not an option for the press, because their clicks and ratings have dropped so precipitously since he left office. Film of an empty podium at his gilded Florida palace is bound to attract more eyeballs than the latest White House press briefing, Since Biden Spin Doctor Jen Psaki has asked that reporters submit their questions in advance, the better for her to answer them truthily and transparently, there is no longer even that element of unscripted surprise and comedic improv so essential for the maintenance of good ratings.

While the corporate media performers are attempting to stave off the boredom and tedium of not having Trump fill their empty spaces, they're promoting daughter in law Lara Trump's quest for a North Carolina senate seat and drumming up publicity for daughter Ivanka's own moves to oust Marco Rubio in the Florida senatorial primary. Because no matter how tainted, political dynasties must never be allowed to die. 

In other news, a study by the esteemed British journal Lancet reveals that fully 40 percent of all Covid deaths in the US could have been prevented. These deaths are not only attributable to the incompetence and corruption of the Trump administration, they are the direct result of the free-market neoliberalism of the last 40 years, not to mention the colonial and imperialistic roots of American society itself.

One of the Lancet group's prescriptions, sensibly enough, is the implementation of single payer health care in the United States. But it can't even get a theatrical floor vote in the Democratic-controlled House. And Biden has infamously vowed to veto such a measure, commonly known as Medicare For All, should it ever reach his desk.

There are too many rusted cans in the landfill known as American democracy to count. And don't even get me started on the worms.

Marge & Darrell & Ted & Alex

 Just because Congress now resembles a typical American high school, what with all the armed federal troops protecting the premises from armed adolescents posing as elected reps and credentialed support staff, doesn't mean that the typical cliques and petty scandals and rampant cheating cannot go on as usual. Politico has a new gossipy piece up, dishing about the six distinct frosh cliques already forming in the lower House: the hardcore Trumpies, the Republican Resistance Fighters, the Texas Six, the anti-Squad Force, and Friends of the Squad. They're mixing, they're mingling, they're trashing each other in the very best Heathers tradition.

 Politico doesn't go so far as to report that voting is already underway for the winners in various "most likely to" categories for the 2021 congressional yearbook. But here's my own inside scoop:

Class Clown: The heavy favorite to win in the crazy department is, of course Marjorie Taylor-Greene, the Q Conspiracy Queen of Georgia. When Marge isn't calling for the assassination of House Headmistress Nancy Pelosi, she's chasing fellow freshman Cori Bush down the hall shouting racist epithets. She's in no danger of being expelled for uttering her terrorist threats quite yet because, democratic institution that it is, it would take two thirds of her colleagues to kick her out. And quite a few of them, especially the Anti-Squad and the Texas Six, are almost as zany as she is.

Richest Frat Rat: California's Darrell Issa dropped out of Congress High in 2018 to spend more time with his money, but now he's back on campus to reclaim his Right-ful place as the richest jerk ever to grace Hallowed Hall with his presence. Worth as much as half a billion bucks, Darrell ran for a seat in another Golden State district which was recently vacated by convicted felon Duncan Hunter. Issa barely beat a Democrat who was even more conservative than he was, largely because his opponent bragged to voters he would not support Joe Biden because he is too liberal. I have no insider info yet as to whether Darrell will resume his career as a lowly 68 year old freshman gazillionaire, or whether he still packs the seniority clout he'd amassed when he precipitously left Hallowed Hall only two years ago. Besides, his theft of a Maserati and a concealed weapon conviction back when he had just dropped out of real high school have apparently been expunged from his official record. 

Creepiest Campus Creep: Ted Cruz always reminded me of the child-stalking predatory preacher played by Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter.

But he has long since advanced from performing his depraved Dr. Seuss bedtime filibusters for the prevention of the prevention of cruelty to all living things. His senior prank this year has been the radical aiding and abetting of Donald Trump's attempted coup.

Best Put-Down Artist On Campus: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Alex to her friends, AOC to everyone else ) in full view of her 10 million Twitter followers very publicly just humiliated Ted Cruz, spurning his oafish and very disturbing advances to crash the Wall Street frat party of day traders with him. AOC wouldn't be caught dead with Ted, for the simple reason that Ted already tried to have her murdered once.  She is still understandably traumatized by the Siege of January Sixth, on top of trying to recover from the "violence" of comedian Jimmy Dore calling her out for her M4A #Force the Vote wimpiness. AOC certainly didn't achieve her hard-won slot in Hallowed Hall trouncing creepy BMOC Joe Crowley only to then let Creepy Ted sic his Proud Boys and Bugaloo Bois goons on her. Reddit, forget it. These games must stop. But her deluge of pithy tweets must never end.

So there you have them: Marge & Darrell & Ted & Alex starring in a movie about a motley crew of politicians, hailing from swing and non-swing districts alike. Don't forget to vote for the ones you hate, the ones you love, the ones you love to hate and the ones you hate to love. Your vote, as always, will mean absolutely nothing because it will never even be counted. Only your clicks will count, and your personal data will be duly collected the better to efficiently target you with a deluge of ads that never stop. 

It's all a show to keep you either lulled to sleep and spurred into a state of relentless and helpless rage.  Pass the popcorn, and try not to choke on it as you are regaled with the outlandish triple feature plot of Divided America, the New Dawn of Democracy and United We Oligarchs Stand.  

Meanwhile, it is very important not to confuse Marge & Darrell & Ted & Alex with a less flamboyant but much more powerful clique of "moderates" who are all piling into bed together to try and convince their audience that austerity for the masses of people is cool and adult. If you don't think that Mitt Romney and Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and Thom Tillis have the power to swing Joe Biden into agreeing that cutting federal pandemic aid by two-thirds is a titillating S&M turn-on, then you not only don't know plots,  you are not very skilled at suspending your innate power of disbelief in the interests of unity and soul restoration.

We've seen how this particular show ends hundreds of times before. The performers outstare each other, multiple platitudes are mumbled, nothing much happens, and then they all go home to multiple dwelling places. through any number of revolving doors.

The Unbearable Rightness of Bipartisan Being

I don't know what was worse about the latest inauguration: the shameless display of plutocratic preening among the honored attendees, or the corporate media's fawning coverage of same. I hesitated even to open the New York Times this morning for fear of all the sugary projectile vomitus hitting me in the eye.

The church-attending, the candle-lighting, the cemetery-visiting, the coy mask-slipping and the glad-handing among the wealthy and powerful leaders of our country looked, from my vantage point out here in the sticks anyway, like nothing less than one of those notorious Covid super-spreader events for which the Trumpies were so soundly and rightly castigated when they were in power. Michelle Obama was hugging everybody in sight, while Barack went right for his cohort's ears in order to whisper whatever sweet nothings these people whisper to one another when they reunite. And why not? They all probably completed their own vaccine regimens weeks ago.

I wasn't actually paying very close attention to the spectacle and Joe Biden's speech because I was on the phone with my son, who'd just tested positive for Covid-19 on the very same day that he got his first vaccination. He had finally been designated by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as a deserving front-line worker/first responder. It's a relief that, for now anyway, he seems to have a mild case. And that's doubly good because although he contracted the virus in the line of duty, he has been allotted only seven days to quarantine and recover, and to use his own sick time to do so. 

So if I'm not offering my traditional analysis of the latest president's latest overpraised maudlin speech, it's because it's the least of my worries right now. I suspect it is also the least of the worries of 330 million of my fellow citizens, one in three of whom have been directly affected by the pandemic.

When I finally clicked on the New York Times this morning, it did indeed resemble a big puddle of sugary vomit floating in a giant gold-plated toilet bowl. All the celebrities were there in an interactive map, and so was their designer fashion. Michelle Obama wore a silk face mask, color-coordinated with her royal magenta coat and high boots. Bernie Sanders was decked out in such adorable mittens to go with his signature scowl and cheap face mask. It took two whole Times reporters to broadcast this particular bit of earth-shattering news to the truth-starved readership.

Democratic boss James Clyburn, meanwhile, went full Jesus Christ and bragged that unaccountable war criminal George W. Bush, flouting social distancing in this grand new era of bipartisan being, approached him right on the inaugural dais  and praised him for destroying the Sanders candidacy and for pushing the faltering Joe Biden down the throat of America.

“George Bush said to me today, he said, ‘You know, you’re the savior, because if you had not nominated Joe Biden, we would not be having this transfer of power today,” Mr. Clyburn told reporters on a call after the swearing-in ceremony on Wednesday. Mr. Clyburn’s endorsement of Mr. Biden in the Democratic primary in South Carolina in February was credited with rescuing a campaign that had faltered badly in Iowa and New Hampshire.

“He said to me that Joe Biden was the only one who could have defeated the incumbent president,” said Mr. Clyburn, who chatted with Mr. Bush on the inaugural platform before the ceremony and took a selfie with the former president.

All the plutocrats, who so humbly and bipartisanly took their rightful mighty place on the Capitol facade of their own warped brand of democracy, sure showed those terroristic rioting deplorables who so brazenly defaced the sanctity of the institution last week, didn't they? The usurpers were suitably vanquished as a "palpable sense of normalcy and relief" enveloped Washington, itself encased by miles upon miles of razor wire and occupied by 25,000 National Guard troops.

 As Lady Gaga trilled, our flag was still there. 

Welcome back to "Trump: the Prequel."

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.

The Democrats Are Parodies of Themselves

House Minority Whip Jim Clyburn has actually had the chutzpah to complain that his party's attempted co-optation of one of the biggest public uprisings of all time is being "hijacked" by the protesters themselves.

How dare these people who are getting killed and beaten up and terrorized by out-of-control police forces presume to demand that their oppressors be stripped of their money and their power out of some misguided wish to live in peace?

Demands for divesting even small towns of their military hardware are a "distraction," added Rep Karen Bass of California.

Plus, if the Dems recklessly do right by the citizens, what will the Republicans say and do? (What will the neighbors think?) The opinion of the bad neighbors on the other side of the shared fence is a top priority if the Dems have any hope of redecorating their chambers with new "moderate" seats this fall.

So Congressional Democrats did the only thing they know how to do whenever they're confronted with some actual democracy. First, they blamed Trump and their  Republican colleagues. Then they staged one those perennial stunts which substitutes for policy in the public interest. They donned traditional Kente cloths  and took a knee for precisely 8 minutes and 46 seconds, the same amount of time that it took for their hired police state knee to suffocate the life out of George Floyd. The sound of hundreds of creaking joints and the even creakier neoliberal rhetoric of "reform" as a cure for corruption reverberated throughout the media echo chamber.

It was a reminder that there will be no true reform of state-sanctioned brutality on their watch. They may have thought they were showing solidarity with George Floyd and other victims of the police state. But their arthritic knees only served to remind us who is controlling the knees, fists, grenade launchers, tear gas and bullets of the police.  They may also have thought they were displaying their pro-science cred during Covid-19 by social-distancing and wearing masks. But they were only flaunting how distanced they truly are from the masses of people, most of whom don't even have a couple of hundred bucks saved up for a household emergency. Their masked faces only reminded us that they are bandits and marauders who steal from the poor and give, give, and give to their oligarchic donors.

The sight of Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) grimacing in pain as though he were struggling to get off a toilet also reminds us how mentally constipated the whole lot of them are. 

They yack on and on about the need for "big structural change," as though centuries of institutional racism and class oppression sprang up all by themselves. They are loath to admit that they are the chief architects and developers and designers and agents and enablers of the Structure.

Donald Trump, the convenient villain of the theatrics, played his own part to perfection, accusing the corporate tools in the Democratic Party of radical leftism and thus giving them cover for their aggrieved stunt. The trouble is,  hardly anybody believes their reality show is even tenuously tethered to reality.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, however, is not playing his own assigned role with the glib finesse of a Barack Obama. As much as he panders to the "movement," he just cannot lie and disown the police state this late in his misbegotten career. He will continue throwing unaccountable billions at Cop World if he is re-elected. There will be no dismantling of police forces under his watch. He and Trump are on the same ideological page regarding state-sanctioned brutality, much as Obama admitted that he was the same page as Mitt Romney in 2012, regarding austerity and the "need" to cut Social Security and other public programs at the behest of Wall Street.

Because the worldwide protest movement is multiracial and multi-generational, the governing class's clinging to identity politics as a substitute for justice is more easily seen for what it is - a con. Leaders of both establishment parties can no longer fall back on the "divide and conquer" techniques traditionally used to keep us in line. Trump can't engender fears of a "race war," because we're all in this together. Liberal CEOs and corporations can no longer proclaim "solidarity" with the victims of the uniformed weaponized oppression that they've always relied upon to protect themselves and their own looted property and their gated mansions. Amazon's Jeff Bezos cannot get away with standing with black people, not after he just fired the black organizer of a walkout at his Staten Island facility, where underpaid workers were denied paid sick or family leave for Covid-19.

What really terrifies them is the prospect of a general labor strike in tandem with the anti-police demonstrations.

A new poll commissioned by Just Capital reveals that only 25 percent of Americans think that capitalism is good for society. Few people are anxious to return to work in the midst of a deadly pandemic. Most people are angry at the billionaires and corporations who haven't done right by their workers in the middle of this social, economic and health crisis.

Only one out of nine publicly traded corporations temporarily increased worker salaries during the crisis, while seven out of every ten CEOs maintained their obscene salaries, which on average are about 300 times that of the average American worker. The 10 percent of workers whose pay was raised during the first months of the pandemic have largely seen their salaries return to pre- Covid levels.

And the Stock Market continues to climb.

As the New York Times put it: "Investors shrugged."

 Michael Bloomberg, the godzillionaire former mayor who thus far this campaign season has shoveled at least $18 million to the copacetic Democratic Party, spoke for the entire oligarchic police state when he bragged while obliterating the Occupy movement in 2011: "I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world."

Meanwhile, Democrats in costume performing clumsy dance moves have introduced the usual"sweeping legislation" to reform the domestic occupying forces. This means that they will strive mightily to sweep the abuses right under the rug via the Bidenesque solution of "community policing" as code for continued militarization. We'll have to wait and see how the irate citizenry reacts to his own particular bragging about how he let law enforcement write his 1994 Crime Bill, much as the predatory health insurance industry was allowed to write the Affordable Care Act.

To avoid the defunding of corrupt and violent departments, the legislation calls for databases of police misconduct, the better to track it with.

 But without defining "last resort," it would also allow cops to use deadly force only as a last resort. Therefore, if a reckless officer thinks that somebody is looking at him funny and then shoots him, the codified Doctrine of the Last Resort will become the go-to defense in the unlikely event he or she faces criminal prosecution.

The national uptick in frightening "no-knock" SWAT raids, increasingly with the aid of dangerous flash grenades, tear gas and  battering rams affixed to tanks would be tamped down a smidgen by only banning such assaults at the federal level. States would somehow be "incentivized" to do the same.

One nifty proposal, put forth by Nancy Pelosi, is to redirect money to school policing and mental health, as though the two concepts were joined at the hip.

The legislative package also includes a federal ban on lynching. How much bolder and more sweeping could it possibly get?

People will be so impressed, they'll be rioting in the streets with joy after they tell their bosses to take their expired hazard pay and shove it.

The Wall Plus Russiagate Equals Distraction

Donald Trump is rattled about the Mueller investigation. Therefore, the Democrats colluded with him on Tuesday to change the subject from his legal woes to The Wall and the usual pre-Christmas government shutdown threats. The only thing they have to fear is that their marketing of Fear to the rabble is less successful than it used to be.

So Trump once again played his grotesquely seductive spider part to perfection as he sent his always-irresistible invitation to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to join him in his sticky oval-shaped web of a parlor.

The House Speaker-in-waiting and the Senate Majority Leader played their own supporting roles reasonably well, mawkishly casting their desperate gazes and pleadings toward the whirring TV cameras in the room as often as they directed them at their arachnoid host. 

Vice President Mike Pence had even less of a supporting role, because his non-speaking function as Chief Toady consisted entirely of swiveling his little white metronome of a head at the Democrats to Trump and then back again. To his credit, though, he was able to maintain a stolid manspreading pose throughout the skit that had him glued in the chair next to his more voluble manspreading boss. 

I don't know who was in charge of the sound system for this latest episode of the Trump Reality TV show, but somebody certainly neglected to give Pelosi a proper working microphone. Trump boomed out his incoherence, and even Chuck came through loud and clear as he vied with Trump for the opportunity to interrupt Nancy at every turn. Pelosi sounded like she was talking through a mask of cotton wool as she wonkishly and patiently and ineffectually attempted to lecture Trump on the mechanics of legislation.

It was a performance designed to show Trump at his bullying superior best next to the schoolmarm persona dreaded by many an American male even long after he's escaped the physical classroom. Trump succeeded mightily in showcasing the Democratic leaders as the hapless weaklings they are. Schumer was reduced to sputtering that Trump had lost two states, when he should have used his TV time to wax indignant over the very xenophobic idea of a Wall to keep out refugees and immigrants.

For her part, Pelosi carefully saved her (strategically leaked) anti-Trump vitriol until after the meeting, when it would be least effective. If only she had questioned his manhood right to his manspreading corpus and right to his sneering face, then it might actually have meant something. 

But that's not what Democrats do. They portray themselves as emotionally and intellectually superior victims in a futile attempt to create some space between GOP corruption and Democratic corruption. The maintenance of their smugness is more important to them than, say, agitating for Medicare for all and a federal jobs program. 

The Wall and the Shutdown of Doom episode momentarily deflected attention away from Trump's legal woes for the space of one more Trump-orchestrated 24 hour news cycle. With the corporate media and their talking heads so busily talking among themselves about impeachment and Oval Office manners and the "unprecedented" bicker-fest among America's top political leaders, there simply have not been enough resources left to cover matters of more pressing concern to the ordinary people who have been co-opted into giving these chronically weak people their very powerful jobs.

There certainly hasn't been enough time to cover the immensely popular Yellow Vests movement in France, other than for the occasional editorial bemoaning of President Emanuel Macron's imperialistic style and his failure to tamp down the discontent as ably and as glibly as his neoliberal pro-bank American counterpart, Barack Obama, so recently did.