Biden's Slow Walk To High Speed

Comparisons of Joe Biden with FDR just refuse to die, despite the president's ostentatious return to his center-right roots, stuffing his administration with Wall Street cronies, and allowing food aid and health care and rental assistance programs to expire with his cruelly premature cancellation of the Covid-19 public health emergency.

Biden's minions are nonetheless trying to keep the FDR mystique alive by ludicrously comparing his piecemeal initiative to expand internet access to Roosevelt's own massive Rural Electrification Act. Since it's costing more in 21st century dollars to build broadband capacity than it did to electrify rural areas during the Great Depression, they're even insinuating that Biden is superior to Roosevelt. 

The first trick is to call it "historic," as the White House is doing with its time-delayed dribbling out of $40 billion worth of grants to states who must submit detailed plans to get even a down-payment, possibly next year, on the promised funds. The bulk of the money would not be out the door until 2030, at the earliest. This is according to the Commerce Department, whose ex-Google assistant secretary will be in charge of vetting the applications.

And we all know what happens whenever these grants remain unused for what is deemed  to be too long. As with the unspent Covid relief funds, presidents can simply bide their time and make deals with Congress to "claw back" federal grants from recalcitrant, or struggling, or corrupt states - all in the name of tackling the federal deficit and giving more tax breaks to the wealthy and buying more guns and bombs for Permawar. This is just the deal that Biden made with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on those unspent pandemic funds. They will help defray the costs of the still-enshrined Trump-era tax cuts for billionaires.

So even while the money for the broadband infrastructure projects will be cynically slow in coming, the White House itself is wasting no time in the self-aggrandizing department. When it comes to bragging in an election season, the need for speed is of the essence. Biden, his staffers and even his family members will be "fanning out" all over the country to tout both his aspirational accomplishments and his long-expired accomplishments, and to outlandishly insist that right now, this very minute, in the spirit of FDR, they "are delivering on their historic commitments."

If you dream of a high speed connection to Amazon to gawk at stuff that you can't afford because Biden reneged on his promise to raise the minimum wage, it will come. If you can't believe, or you're not fond of nightmares,  then you ain't American, and you will probably vote for Trump (or what Biden once called "the other Biden.')

Of course, they will be very careful with their actual words. You will only be guaranteed future "access" to "affordable" high speed Internet, not only to connect with family, friends, school and job, but to "access" fee-for-service health care over the Internet. This will probably be monopolized by Amazon, once they get those pesky privacy concerns out of the way.

To cement the ethos that we must all strive to be good soldiers for the cause of Capitalism, the Biden administration has dubbed the program BEAD - Broadband Equity Access and Deployment. This is a triple neoliberal buzzword whammy if there ever was one. 

They love to spout the word "equity" to disguise the fact that they will protect structural inequality to the death. It has been ingrained in us that it is absolute privilege to pay for the Internet - which, in a truly equitable society, would be declared a public utility and a free public service. But since this is an alleged democracy, some Internet users are more equal than others.

The word "access" is bandied about as though a thing, such as medical care, is there for the taking,, rather  than of being cruelly dangled just beyond our reach, due to our inability to pay for it.  It's too bad that the patient died, seeing as how in the greatest country on earth, she had such unlimited opportunity to strive for proximity to the gleaming private equity-owned hospital right down the street.

The fact that Biden is also only touting "access" to an Internet connection means that if you are very lucky, you might even get to see underpaid gig workers stringing cable from your kitchen window - assuming, that is, that if you have a roof over your head.

Finally, they just can't seem to get war and killing off their diseased minds for even a minute, what with the word "deployment". We must, apparently, never forget that life in America is a constant battle and that we must always be in competition with one another as we selfishly strive to fulfill our own individual career goals and passions.

 Biden and his kin and his cronies are "fanning out" to draw a BEAD on us with their weapons of social mass destruction, even while they cynically campaign on promises magically redefined as accomplishments. This is while a third of this country's inhabitants are in dire need of a giant fan to sweep away all the choking smoke and smog engendered by the massive forest fires in Canada. 

The amelioration of capitalism-induced global warming is not part of of the president's Investing in America tour. As a matter of fact, Biden added to the pollution in hazy Washington, DC when he brought the entire Beltway to a halt this week during evening rush hour -just so that he could attend a closed door fund-raiser in a nearby wealthy Maryland enclave. This is otherwise known as putting the "private" back in that ballyhooed equity.

Bodies of Water

An Ocean of Plastic (photo credit, UC-Santa Barbara)

***

"Bodies of Water"

By Nan Socolow

Aeons past

before the plates

became continents

when this Earth

was young

bodies of water

encircled

Pangaea.

Now our

blue planet

is a dying zone

a waking nightmare

pillaged and

plundered,

its watery places

ravaged by mankind.

Civilization has

dumped debris

detritus dreck

bottles and jars

and enough plastic

to gyre and gimble

and strangle the

Pacific wabe.

Bizarre fish

snakeheads

and sea lampreys

with sucking razor

sharp teeth delve

in the fresh water 

of the mighty Mississippi

and Great Lakes

And Lionfish

from Indian and Pacific seas

swimmers loosed from

American aquaria

dressed gauzily 

to kill in fetching saris

swirl en masse

in the Caribbean

Pythons, boas

gators lurk in the

marshy sawgrass

of the Everglades,

eyes aslit for innocent

passers-by

to squeeze and

swallow

The five continents

that were once

Pangaea, connected

like the carapace on a

hawksbill's shell or

jigsaw puzzle pieces,

are now apart and prisoned

by waste waters.

Billions of people

dying for a drink

of clean water for

their birthright

of potable water.

Global warming

and climate change

are inconvenient truths

of our lives

on Earth,

though denied by some

human folk who buy

and chugalug water in billions 

of little plastic bottles

that will remain on Earth

long after we've gone.

***

(This poem by Nan Socolow will be included in a volume (working title, Invasive Procedures: Earthquakes & Calamities) due to be published later this summer.)

Last Tango in Paris

 On second thought, maybe we should call it the Moonwalk. Or maybe even the Hustle.

In what's being described as a do-or-die moment, world leaders converged on Paris to dance around what to do aspirationally, sometime in the future maybe, about climate change and the death of the planet. It remains to be seen whether this Elite Urge-a-Thon will have any oxygen in it.

 President Obama, well-protected by a small security army, called the crucial United Nations summit "an act of defiance" against the recent terror attacks, and  called for cooperation.... among world leaders. He urged regular folks not to be cynical.

Meanwhile, out in the streets, police fired tear gas on regular folks in order to clear the air of voices and human bodies having the poor taste to demand action now. The climate may be changing, but police crackdowns on peaceful protests at international meetings of elites are certainly always in the global forecast. (Oops, my bad. I was told not to be cynical.)

Speaking of man-made pollution, China is cooperating in the Paris talks not a moment too soon. The atmosphere got so bad in Beijing today that life itself has had to be temporarily shut down. Factories and schools closed and residents advised to shelter in place indoors until a wind from the right direction kicks up and blows the terroristic threat into somebody else's neighborhood, or preferably way up into the stratosphere where nobody can actually see what's left of the ozone layer.

Elsewhere on the planet, where the air is still fairly breathable and peaceful protest is still allowed, millions of people came out to support climate change reversal. Sardonicky contributor "Jay-Ottawa" participated in this march in the Canadian capitol on Sunday:

Meanwhile, Prince Charles touched down in Paris to demand that governments stop fossil fuel subsidies. He should know. His mum, Queen Elizabeth, owns a fortune in uranium mines.

Meanwhile, philanthrocapitalist, education "reformer," and unelected world leader Bill Gates burned thousands of gallons of polluting private jet fuel to travel to the City of Light to announce his "initiative" for clean energy research and development. Investment opportunities for the well-connected will abound, all in the name of capitalistic concern-trolling the poor people of the world. Gates, whose Microsoft technology (and its detritus) outsourced to China helps to create the smog, is an opponent of fossil fuel divestment. Therefore, his billion-dollar pledge to "study" green energy will surely help influence the heads of state to speak softly and carry a big twig during their minuet of a talk-fest. No world leader will even think to protest the fact that the Chinese factory workers who help make Gates a gazillionaire live like prisoners while they're trying to breathe all that polluted air.

Eighty billionaires, with Gates in or near the lead, now own as much wealth as the bottom half of the entire world population. This is a guy who fancies himself a postmodern Citizen Kane, complete with the $125 million estate that he so 'umbly named Xanadu 2.0.

  Factoring in his 23-car garage, I think we can all rest assured that Bill Gates is absolutely sincere in combating climate change. Oops. There goes my cynicism again!