A Fascist Pep Talk

In order to maintain its status as "the most lethal fighting force the world has ever known," America must keep waging its endless wars all around the world.

So pronounced "Defense" Secretary Lloyd C. Austiin III to a roomful of weapons manufacturers and venture capitalists and congressional hawks and Silicon Valley moguls and corporate media stars at the Reagan Library's annual security confab in Simi Valley, California over the weekend. He was the keynote speaker at the event, which also featured a cozy "fireside chat" by Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and a panel discussion on defending the Monroe Doctrine led for some unknown reason by tech billionaire Joe Lonsdale. Karl Turdblossom "we create our own reality" Rove was also at the confab, as were the CEO of Boeing and executives from G.E. (pays no taxes) and Microsoft. It was a veritable Who's Who of Who Runs the World.

Since he was among friends, Austin made sure to lighten up the politics of death with a few folksy Ronald Reagan anecdotes, to much appreciative laughter. But he also made Senator Lindsay Graham very mad by suggestiing how civilian deaths in Gaza be slightly minimized. Anything less than calling for the total annihilation of two million Palestinians makes you a complete dove, groused Graham later on CNN.

Austin also toned down his bellicose rhetoric just long enough to brag that any Iraqis whose lives he saved balanced out all the Iraqi lives he helped to end in that illegal war. As a veteran expert in the type of urban warfare the Israelis are waging in Gaza, Austin is directly advising them how to paint a humanitarian face on atrocity by such gimmicks as drawing detailed evacuation maps for Palestinians trying to escape the carnage. Not that this will prevent all deaths of innocent children, of course, but at least they will be seen as trying. Austin also told the assembled overlords that he has even courageously warned the Israel government on how far is too far.

  Meanwhile, the US will continue providing billions of dollars in bombs and other hardware to Israel, with absolutely no strings attached. He just politely asked that they not kill anyl more civilians than are absolutely necessary, Because even if you win the war you can still lose strategically. You can erode all that legendary global good will.

There is apparently no downside in emphasizing the windfall war profits accruing from the mass death of populations that simply are not deemed to be grief-worthy  Austin sounded every inch the fascist demagogue in the bulk of his speech. Not only is he the first non-civilian US defense secretary ever to be appointed, but he came to the post directly from the Board of Directors of Raytheon - which is among the weapons manufacturers supplying both Ukraine and Israel.

Here are just a few chilling snippets from Austin's long, and long-winded, pep talk to the masters of war:  

You know, our competitors don’t have to operate under continuing resolutions. And so, doing so erodes both our security and our ability to compete.

Austin is actually whining about the requirement that Congress has to bother itself rubberstamping a trillion dollars in war appropriations every single year. As the biggest "most lethal fighting force the world has ever known," with US combat troops in 169 countries and some 750 military bases around the world, even to go through the motions of a democratic process before being able to killi people is too much. It gives such an unfair advantage to authoritarian leaders who hate us for our democracy. Waaahhhhhh!

You know, only one country on Earth can provide the kind of leadership that this moment demands. And only one country can consistently provide the powerful combination of innovation, ingenuity, and idealism—and of free minds, free enterprise, and free people.And that’s the United States of America.

[Applause]

Of course they applaud. For General Austin has just admitted the war is essentially a business enterprise. The moguls in the audience stay free by staying obscenely rich. Freedom's just another word for exploiting poor and working people, wherever on this small planet they happen to live.

We’re living through challenging times. That includes the major catonflicts facing our fellow democracies, Israel and Ukraine; bullying and coercion from an increasingly assertive China; and a worldwide battle between democracy and autocracy.

Ukraine's "democracy" is questionable, given that President Zelensky has outlawed independent reporting in his country. Nor can an apartheid state like Israel be considered a democracy; even before October 7th, Bibi Netanyahu was trying to abolish his country's judiciary. That Austin would then harp on China, with its grand total of one military base outside its borders,, being a "bully" is a pretty pathetic case of Freudian projection. He thinks it's a bully because its economy is booming. And thus, besides drawing his cartoon maps for Gaza evacuation, Austin and the rest of the military-industrial complex are hankering for war with China. Think of all the profits for the few, right before everybody gets nuked.

American leadership rallies our allies and partners to uphold our shared security. And it inspires ordinary people around the world to work together toward a brighter future.

Unfortunately for Austin and his cohort, the "brighter future" that ordinary people all over the world are working for is aimed squarely at stopping war. He has apparently drawn a map inside his head where the streets are not filled with anti-genocide protesters. Either that, or he simply wants to make his entitled audience feel confident that everyday people are so stupid as to be awed by such constant overdoses of weaponized palaver.

1.   But the troubles of our times will only grow worse without strong and steady American leadership to defend the rules-based international order that keeps us all safe.

Have you noticed that nobody ever defines this "rules-based international order" so frequently bandied about these days by the ruling class? By my count,  Austin himself uttered this ubiquitous knee-jerk mantra a total of four  times in just this one speech. What precisely are these rules, and who made them? Nobody, certainly has asked the inspired people looking for a brighter future in the future. But by nattering it often enough, perhaps they hope to cow us into just shutting up, lest we inadvertently break one of their mysterious rules. I'll hazard a wild guess, though, that censorship is a big fat part of it.

You know, in every generation, some Americans prefer isolation to engagement—and they try to pull up the drawbridge. They try to kick loose the cornerstone of American leadership. And they try to undermine the security architecture that has produced decades of prosperity without great-power war.

This was where Austin obliquely criticizes the antiwar, anti-genocide movement exploding all over the world. In so doing, he sugar-coats the near constant regime change wars and unilateral attacks by the US on less powerful countries as tantamount to "great prosperity for his audience. He barely avoided the Orwellian "war is peace" canard.

While bemoaning Vladimir Putin's cruelty and championing the Ukrainian troops- including the fascistic Azov battalion - as freedom fighters, Austin portrays the Hamas militants as terrorists and the Zionist slaughter of some 15,000 Palestinians as "self-defense."

Read the rest of the speech (linked in second paragraph above)  or watch it on Youtube if you have the time and the stomach. There are so many glowing references to Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden sprinkled throughout that you're liable to get these goofy old dementos mixed up if you aren't careful. Actually all the presidents in recent memory have sounded exactly like Lloyd Austin in their unrelenting grotesque mixture of good cheer and fear-fomenting.

Looking At Horror Straight In Its Face

 Joe Biden wasn't kidding when he bragged in that shambolic Oval Office speech that bankrolling the twin slaughters in Ukraine and Gaza in one mega-appropriation would be a great investment for America.

Dark Brandon knew whereof he spoke.  Weapons manufacturers like General Dynamics and Raytheon are already posting huge profits since Israel declared war on two million imprisoned Palestinians (duly demoted from human being status to terrorists or sub-human shields for Hamas for purposes of brainwashing the public).

As if that gruesome windfall isn't bad enough, the likelihood that the wealthy investors in mass death will have to pay taxes on their ill-gotten gains will be practically nil, if newly-crowned House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) gets his way.

That's because the House Rules Committee just introduced legislation requiring that the US's $14 billion aid package to Israel, helping to finance the genocide of Gazans, will be offset by $14 billion in cuts to the IRS.

Not only would investigations and prosecutions of wealthy tax evaders be brought to an effective screeching halt, the cuts would also do away with the free digital tax filing program for regular people. Internet filers would actually have to pay a fee for the privilege of underwriting both the military-industrial complex and the wealthy tax cheats.

The Republicans' rationale seems to be that we have to fight the Palestinian families over there by punishing the powerless families over here.  What more apt day is it than Halloween for us to remind ourselves that capitalism is a zombie that must keep replicating itself by varying its diet. Too much is never enough for the ruling class monsters. They were created without any sense of repletion. They are never full. The more that they eat, the hungrier they get.  That especially goes for funding the forever-wars.

The GOP's bill would, of course, have to pass in the Senate, and then require Biden's signature. It's not the punishment of the working class factor that endangers this noxious piece of racist, genocidal, class war legislation, however. It's yhat the extra billions that Biden is demanding for Ukraine war funding is not included. So it's probably already dead on arrival in its current form. Or should I say undead on arrival. We all know that any legislative monster worth its salt (and blood-spatter) will undergo the good old sausage-making treatment in the secret congressional abattoir.

Congress

As far as the reputedly more deliberative Senate is concerned, they not only joined their lesser congressional brethren in enshrining their support of the Israel government, they unanimously and magically transformed a nation full of antiwar and anti-genocide protesters into enemies of the state. The Senate has officially redefined supporters of the Palestinians as supporters of Hamas terrorists. and anti-Semites to boot.

The corporate media are also doing their village-of-the-damnedest best to squelch actual coverage of the protests in the streets, both in the US and throughout the world. If they ignore it they reason, the majority of people will  not learn of the atrocities - or if they do learn about them, they will not much care. Why else would even the staid New York Times be inundating us with story after story about the death of an actor in the "Friends" TV series?  We are invited to substitute mourning this one tragic celebrity death with a bunch of elite Hollywood types, so as to avoid mourning - let alone thinking about - the deaths of thousands of Palestinians, most of whom are women and children.

One exception to this coordinated news blackout of protests came on Halloween morning, when Code Pink activists, red paint on their hands, interrupted the censor-proof,, pro-war  Senate testimony of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Both men sat like stiffs, wearing their terrifying emotionless masks as the protesters were ejected.  

In the age of the Internet, when anyone with a cell phone has the ability  to document the various grotesque realties going on all around us, the ability of the masters of war and the lords and ladies of capital to variously frighten us and censor us is falling apart at the seams. of all their glittery zombie rags.

Instead of shambling around and consuming stuff in order to numb ourselves, regular people are waking up. We're not only taking another long-delayed stand against cruelty and war, we're also going out on strike. And we're winning.

"And then, above all, there is the new arrival - the thinking that does not shy away from the horror of the world, the darkness, but looks it straight in the face, and thus passes over into a different kingdom, which is not the kingdom of darkness." -- Henri Lefebvre.

Dueling Grifters

The more they indict Trump, the higher his poll numbers go. This latest appalling state of affairs is giving the voter-shaming, message-tweaking members of the PMC (professional managerial class) quite the galloping  case of PTSD. (current and post-traumatic stress disorder).The poor things went to all that trouble of inventing the #Russiagate franchise way back in 2016 and later impeaching Trump in a glitzy series of televised docudramas, only to have a nation of Deplorables thumb their noses at all their good intentions. The masses of people have become so incorrigible that they can't even appreciate the Bidenomics Miracle smacking them upside their empty llttle heads. 

The liberal class and their neocon colleagues of the Deep State don't seem to realize that in offering up Donald Trump's hideous head on a series of spinning legal platters is no substitute for lack of health care, food, affordable housing, climate crisis solutions, student debt relief and inflation-engendering corporate greed. 

It has gone way beyond the proverbial tragedy and farce at this stage of the collapse of the American Empire. If there will be any presidential debates at all between Biden and Trump, they will devolve into bickering over which aged white man is the worse crook. 

More people than ever are amenable to the creation of a third party. Even though he has not yet won the Green Party nomination, Cornel West is polling well. The liberal class thus find themselves in quite a quandary, wondering how to smear West without seeming like the racists they accuse the MAGA hordes of being. So right now, their tactic is to accuse him of being a spoiler, fatuously assuming that he is taking votes away from the senile corrupt Joe Biden, while pretending that West simply does not exist.  (RFK Jr is a lot easier to criticize and thus deservedly receives more aghast negative attention.)

This will not be a presidential campaign about the suffering of everyday people. This will be a campaign conducted by dueling criminal prosecution and defense lawyers about whose crooked client most deserves your vote.

The cascade of indictments of Trump is obviously politically motivated, given that his supposed "resisters" sat on their thumbs regarding his criminal enterprises until the current horserace got underway. Biden was able to duck public accountability during the pandemic lockdowns by hiding in his basement. This time around, the best he can do is retreat to his beach house as the coordinated indictments come fast and furious. It is probably no accident that Trump was finally indicted over the January 6th riots during the exact same week that Biden's influence-peddling scheme with his son threatened to grab away all the public attention.

And of course, Trump is not actually being charged with leading an attempted coup but merely with spreading lies and disinformation about a "stolen"election. 

The public is being cordially invited to guess who his six co-conspirators will turn out to be. Much to the chagrin of the "rules-based order" spinning their narratives, however, the deplorable public is too busy worried about their survival to care about what a bunch of rich oligarchs and their lawyers are up to.

The political-media complex never did want to pay much attention to who empowered Trump in the first place: themselves.

Meanwhile, they're desperately trying to change the conversation over their botched proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Far, far below the myriad scare headlines in the New York Times about the never-ending Battle Against Trump is an article titled "Ukrainian Troops Trained by US Stumble in Battle."

The Ukrainian draftees did not pay attention in their crash course in advanced American war-making.. Apparently, the Ukrainian soldiers equipped with billions of dollars in weapons simply are not sophisticated enough to absorb all the nuances of American aggression. They even  damaged a whopping 20 percent of the tanks and other high-tech sophisticated killing machine so graciously bestowed upon them.

“Arguably, the problem was in the (naive) US assumption that with a few months of training, Ukrainian units could be converted into fighting more the way that American forces might fight, leading the assault against a well-prepared Russian defense, rather than helping Ukrainians fight more the best way they know how.” the Times quotes a spokesman for the cynically named Carnegie Endowment for Peace as saying.

Those Ukrainan draftees rank right down there with the American electorate. Neither the war nor the election are going well for Biden. It's all the fault of people with no money and power - not the fault of a senile and corrupt president and his criminal cohort. 

So let's roll out another indictment or two and throw more billions at the war profiteers to substitute for health care and debt relief.

One consolation in this era of Post-Tragical Farce is that the ongoing writers' and actors' strike is putting a damper on the Hollywood propaganda traditionally churned out in such vacuous abundance as to put a happy face  on the predatory capitalism that is both silently and loudly killing us all.

What will the culture war pundits even have to talk about once the war between Barbie and Oppenheimer gets stale and the Trump indictments lose what little public relations effectiveness they still enjoy?

Why the Armed US Hegemon Hates Reproductive Freedom

 I joked in my last post that with the way things are going for Joe Biden, his approval rating is going to plummet down to One Percent.

And lo and behold, a few days later a new poll revealed that only one percent of 18 to 29-year-olds "strongly approve" of the job that Joe Biden is doing.  The establishment media are pointing to the dreaded "generation gap," with which they have traditionally explained away all manner of social discontents. The revolt of the young was particularly strong during the 1960s, with uprisings against the military draft and and a parallel clamoring for civil rights and racial justice. Then came the 70s and the right-wing counter-revolution and the lords of finance capital co-opting all the turmoil by dividing the working class, destroying unions and making "personal responsibility" the core dogma of their neoliberal agenda. The protesters of the 60s were replaced by the debt slaves and minimum wage earners of today.

But then came Covid, and the overturning of Roe v Wade, and the pendulum may finally be swinging back into the civil revolt phase. The media-political complex is paying the usual condescending lip service to the young and discontented, acknowledging that there is an atherosclerotic gerontocracy running the place.  For its own part, the clueless White House was only too happy to prove the theory that the old codgers really do have it out for all of us, sniffing that "activists have consistently been out of the mainstream of the Democratic Party."

As if that were a bad thing, given that the party's "main stream" has become so clogged with the raw sewage of neo-McCarthyism in the service of corporatism that the law of physics all but demands that new renegade rivulets develop and set their own courses. 

And this much is obvious: the gerontocrats, as much as they despise the dissatisfied young, need to keep feasting on their blood. If you want to know the core reason that the Democratic leadership has been so remiss in codifying Roe vs Wade and taking on the reactionary Supreme Court, then look no further than the plummeting US birthrate.  The Supremes are the Democratic establishment's secret best friends.

Since there are simply not enough young bodies around any more to fight in their endless wars for corporate profit and global dominance, the right of non-elite women to guaranteed birth control and abortion is, effectively, anathema to the ruling class and their world order. And this latest "NATO" war against Russia, possibly expanding to China and beyond, is projected to last for decades. Boots on the ground will be desperately needed, decade after decade. The reproductive supply chain must not be interrupted at this fraught point in time.

But since they can't come right out and say so without looking like the sociopaths that they are, they foist the blame on today's young people for being  too dumb, too greedy, too thuggish and too fat to fight and kill for them.

Or as the New York Times more delicately headlines the distressing cannon fodder shortage: "With Few Able and Fewer Willing, US Military Can't Find Recruits:

These are tough times for military recruiting. Almost across the board, the armed forces are experiencing large shortfalls in enlistments this year — a deficit of thousands of entry-level troops that is on pace to be worse than any since just after the Vietnam War. It threatens to throw a wrench into the military’s machinery, leaving critical jobs unfilled and some platoons with too few people to function.

Covid-19 is part of the problem. Lockdowns during the pandemic have limited recruiters’ ability to forge bonds face to face with prospects. And the military’s vaccine mandate has kept some would-be troops away.

The horror. 

Not only is America's potential weaponized flesh ignorant about The Science of vaccines, they're ungrateful money-hungry little wretches who are more interested in getting rich off all the great high-paying service jobs out there than they are in dying for The Homeland. In Timespeak:

The current white-hot labor market, with many more jobs available than people to fill them, is also a factor, as rising civilian wages and benefits make military service less enticing.

If they're not greedy, then kids today are so criminally depraved and/or obese that the desperate US military is forced to reject them when they do apply.  According to the Times, fully three-quarters of military applicants have some sort of criminal record, or are physically unfit.

The paper does not delve into why this is so, never factoring in the hopelessness of those who have never known any reality but the iron heel of capitalism, with no positive government investment or intervention in their lives since the day they were born.

But the bipartisan heirs of Ronald Reagan and his neoliberal baby-mama Margaret Thatcher are all too cynically willing to bribe these needy people with bonuses if they join the cause of imperialism:

To try to counter those forces, the military has pushed enlistment bonuses as high as $50,000, and is offering “quick ship” cash of up to $10,000 for certain recruits who can leave for basic training in 30 days. To broaden the recruiting pool, the service branches have loosened their restrictions on neck tattoos and other standards. In June, the Army even briefly dropped its requirement for a high school diploma, before deciding that was a bad move and rescinding the change.

The best part of our free public education system for the military-industrial complex, in fact, is that armed forces recruiters (more lately augmented by domestic police patrols) have long been ubiquitous in American high schools. I remember getting relentless calls from all four branches of the military asking for my son and daughter, whose names and phone number they had acquired from school administrators, whose federal funding was contingent upon their cooperation. Nothing we said ever discouraged these recruiters from calling us over and over again, over a period of several years. When my son told one caller that he didn't want to kill people in a war, the recruiter outright lied and said he would never have to, dangling before him instead the prospect of easy big money, job training and subsidized education - in effect, making a cynical appeal to his nascent avarice.

The Times article at least did honestly describe US high schools as "the military's most productive hunting grounds," while not exploring the possible connection between the increased number of school shootings and the preoccupation of certain young American males with military assault rifles and accessories like camo vests and body armor.

Unfortunately, as one Air Force major general, Edward Thomas Jr,  complained to the newspaper,  

. The relationships that recruiters were not able to cultivate face to face during the pandemic’s early stages, he said, mean there is now a drought of graduates signing on the dotted line.

Oh no, not another drought! It's as bad as the nerve of the vast majority of American young folks for not approving the job performance of Commander-in-Chief Joe Biden. It's just terrible when a drought of weaponized bodies combines with Roe vs Wade activists who refuse to swim with the sharks in Democratic mainstream! Especially when the Powers That Be unhelpfully describe the worsening Covid pandemic as only a "short-term problem."

The Times article continues,

And what the military calls propensity — the share of young adults who would consider serving — has fallen steadily for several years. It stood at 13 percent before the pandemic began, General Thomas said, but is now 9 percent.

“There are just lower levels of trust with the U.S. government and the military,” he said.

Once again, there are certainly no deep dives into the "pool" to explain just why so many people, both young and old, are so dissatisfied with the consortium of politicians, corporate CEOs, generals, tech billionaires, arms dealers and bureaucrats that comprise the government.

Going with the flow, or staying within a party "mainstream," is a lot to ask of the people that our leaders are actively trying to drown: the forced dunking is the lack of guaranteed, single payer health care, housing, debt free education and the ironclad protection of reproductive rights in all 50 states.

So it's gratifying to learn that the people are, in ever increasing numbers, telling their overlords to just go soak their heads when they urge us to vote, vote and vote, even as they admonish us to leave the Supreme Court forced-birthers in peace, and above all, to only engage in the kind of regimented violence that is fully sanctioned by the oligarchic state.

When they tell you to shut up, when they try to drown you out, just keep on screaming. Our voices are the only life-preservers that too many of us have left.

Maudlin Tears of the Pathocrats

 Fresh from his World War III-mongering junket to Asia, highlighted by his provocative vow to militarily defend Taiwan in the event of aggression by China, Joe Biden again wondered aloud why there is so damned much gun violence back in The Homeland.

He wondered anew why this violent nation of ours can't stand up to the "gun lobby -" as if it hasn't rewarded and enabled gun manufacturers and their Wall Street investors more and more with every passing year. He and other politicians in both our ruling class parties performed another round of quickly evaporating maudlin tears, this one for the Texas children killed in Tuesday's mass shooting. One of the two right wings continues to mindlessly champion the rights of the "responsible" gun owners, and the other one addresses the pathology of 331 million US citizens owning almost half a billion firearms among them as a malady needing only a few "common-sense" gauze pads to make the whole boo-boo disappear. As if properly registering one's weapon and proving one's mental health bona fides were themselves more than conscience-salving band-aids for the root cause of increasing shootings: unfettered predatory capitalistic rule by a relative handful of oligarchs, leading to depression, anxiety, poverty, no health care in a pandemic, and violent acting-out on a record scale. 

Biden recently kvetched in an "off the record" interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that he despairs of ever "uniting" this country. His agenda has nothing to do with uniting Democrats with Republicans, not least because most voters in the US don't belong to either elite party. Rather he aims to unite Americans around common propaganda, for the ultimate benefit of the security state and its plutocratic profiteers.

The late Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci observed during the rise of fascism, prior to World War II, that hegemons can only maintain power through the repression and oppression of their people while simultaneously orchestrating people's tacit consent to be repressed and oppressed - whether through government propaganda, news organs, or other influence campaigns. The fact that Biden's own ill-conceived "Disinformation Board" was so deservedly short-lived is not that right-wing factions waged a "disinformation campaign" against it. It was because too many people across the spectrum were wise to the fact that they were being played, as in the ongoing elite suppression of our unsanctioned speech.

Biden and his fellow elites are upset that their domestic propaganda, their bellicosity, and their ham-fisted attempts at censorship ("unifying the country") of non-elite views are such failures. They are grasping at all manner of "outside" enemies to try and divert our attention away from their own pathologies. And in that process, they are endangering all of us.

  The USA may have the military might, but as far as any follow-up Marshall Plan to preserve and enhance its global hegemony is concerned, things have gotten very topsy-turvy indeed. Rather than a Berlin airlift, it is that same post-war Europe, which America has treated as its vassal state for nearly 80 years, which is now flying baby formula to our shores.  Biden was so busy globe-trotting and selling the next world war that he apparently hadn't known there even was a shortage, and that American infants have been in danger of starving en masse for at least the past six months.

It's also the height of irony that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg simultaneously defended and blamed the oligopolistic system responsible for the domestic baby formula shortage, even as our neoliberal government was finally forced to intervene and aid the same oligopoly which it has deemed to be the most virtuous and common-sense source of life for our babies.  Even more supremely ironic, perhaps, is that Buttigieg's late father was one of the world's premier Gramsci scholars who translated his prison writings into English for the enlightenment of any American who cares to read them, and be inspired by them.

So when Biden and his fellow politicians claim to care so deeply about "our beautiful children," do not believe them for one instant. All they care about is getting re-elected. And even if they lose, they win.... through their corporate-funded think tanks, their closed-door fundraisers, their nepotistic corruption, their TV gigs, their forever-wars. 

As John Mearsheimer lays out in "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics" hegemons can only achieve and maintain their superpower global hegemonic status if they are already regional hegemons. And the iron grip that the US has had on Central and South America and the Caribbean now appears to be finally loosening. Several of these nations are boycotting this year's Summit of the Americas, because current host Joe Biden is not inviting leftist countries Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba to participate.

ABC-Disney, one of the very few state- and corporate-sanctioned sources of information and manufactured consent still remaining, is very worried that a more unified and recalcitrant southern hemisphere might put a damper on the global hegemony and wars that it so handsomely profits from:

A hollow summit would undermine efforts by the U.S. to reassert its influence in Latin America when China is making inroads and concerns grow that democracy is backsliding in the region....

 The uncertainty is a sign of chaotic planning for the summit, which is scheduled to take place in a little more than two weeks in Los Angeles. Normally, gatherings for heads of state are organized long in advance, with clear agendas and guest lists.

“There’s no excuse that they didn’t have enough time,” said Ryan Berg, a senior fellow in the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “This is our chance to set a regional agenda. It’s a great opportunity. And I’m afraid we’re not going to take it.”

And that is such a damned shame, just when Biden was thinking of easing the economic sanctions on starving Venezuelans and their babies by graciously allowing Chevron back into Venezuela to exploit its starving people and their babies. That is the same Chevron, remember, which bypassed the US judicial system and tried, convicted and imprisoned environmental lawyer Steven Donziger for the affront of having won  a major pollution case against the oil giant when it committed fraud and pollution in Ecuador.

Biden and his bipartisan corporate cohort have brought a whole new meaning to Hannah Arendt's banality of evil.  People the whole world over are noticing not only their systemic ingrained evil, but also their essential stupidity.

What with climate disasters, societal collapses and insane wars, that essential stupidity can be a cause for either optimism or pessimism. Either the stupidly powerful destroy themselves, or their stupidity is so powerful that it translates into longevity. 

Unfortunately, when the powerfully stupid and the stupidly powerful talk about loving children, they're mainly talking abut their own offspring, and their offspring after them. 

Onward, Christofascist Soldiers

 Barely a week after promising at least another $40 billion in subsidies to US weapons manufacturers for the war in Ukraine, and mere days after grotesquely demanding that surplus Covid aid money be used by cities to hire more armed cops, Joe Biden shuffled off to Buffalo to decry hate and violence in his boilerplate response to the latest domestic mass shooting.

The corporate media dutifully are not calling this out as rank hypocrisy, but instead are once again portraying the Commander in Chief as the Consoler in Chief. What they're really trying to accomplish in the coverage and narrative of the weekend's upstate New York grocery store massacre is that the strict line of demarcation between the acceptable, state-sanctioned violence waged only out of love, safety and democracy, and the unacceptable freelance variety perpetrated out of racism, hate and evil must be maintained at all costs.  War, of course, is not deemed to be a hate crime. That its global victims are disproportionately black and brown is not deemed to be racist.

Joe Biden and the Democrats once again are mouthing their feeble, meaningless entreaties for "modest" and "common-sense" gun law reform. They ignore the obvious culprits: the gun manufacturers and arms dealers themselves, and especially the private equity firms and "holding companies" which own them and finance them and profit from both the state-sanctioned and freelance violence which they enable. 

In his stale litany of platitudes, Biden certainly does not include the armed forces and the weapons industry as part of the white supremacist establishment which has ruled this nation since its inception. It's only when the movement goes rogue and freelance that the real supremacists with the real power get all upset, or at least pretend to. 

He also won't pay much if any lip service to the enforced control and impoverishment of most US citizens by the American oligarchy and its enablers in the professional-managerial class comprising the top 10 percent of income earners. Not for nothing did impoverished Buffalo elect its first socialist mayor in a Democratic primary last year, only for her victory to then be thwarted by an influx of Republican money and a write-in campaign to fix the runoff for her centrist Democratic challenger. 

Biden certainly will not call for a punitive tax on the obscene profits of  the weapons manufacturers that are promoting and enabling both state-sanctioned violence and the renegade variety. To the contrary: under the fig leaf of "humanitarian aid" to places like Ukraine, the weapons industry is one of the biggest recipients of government welfare. Wall Street would have a hissy fit if war and local police states were taxable, as would the investors that finance and control both our establishment political parties.

Both the Buffalo shooter and the young man who committed the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre used Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifles.  This past February, the Sandy Hook parents finally reached a $73 million settlement with Remington, which under the laws of corporate bankruptcy was a heavily insured holding company in the process of selling itself and changing its name, so that shadow owners and investors in assault weapons can continue raking in the profits and whitewashing their reputations under the musical chairs business model. This reality makes the Sandy Hook victory both pyrrhic and premature, despite what plaintiffs' lawyers crowed at the time. From CNN's report:

The families have also “obtained and can make public thousands of pages of internal company documents that prove Remington’s wrongdoing and carry important lessons for helping to prevent future mass shootings,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys said in a news release.

“We established what was clearly true … the immunity protecting the gun industry is not bulletproof,” plaintiffs’ attorney Josh Koskoff said in a news conference in Trumbull, Connecticut. “We hope they realize they have skin in the game, instead of blaming literally everybody else.”

The Buffalo gunman's manifesto, pointing to the racist "great replacement theory" as the impetus for his crime spree, rightly puts the onus on various elected GOP nut-jobs and Fox News for spreading the paranoid propaganda.

However, this concentration on white supremacist hate speech again lets Wall Street off the hook.

The very name of "Freedom Group" - under which the  Bushmaster assault rifle and other models were owned and manufactured until the Sandy Hook atrocity - points to the essential right-wing extremism of its corporate owners and investors.

Freedom Group was simply the name of a subsidiary of the Cerberus Capital Management private equity group. Cerberus, you might remember, is the vicious three-headed dog of Greek mythology that guards the gates of hell. So you probably can at least give these corporate psychopaths a few extra points for being so self-aware. 

As tbe New York Times reported in a 2011 investigative article, rumor among paranoid right-wing circles at the time had it that Democratic megadonor George Soros was buying up big, but financially struggling, assault rifle makers for the express purpose of putting them out of business permanently. No such luck:

Mr. Soros isn’t behind the Freedom Group, but, ultimately, another financier is: Stephen A. Feinberg, the chief executive of Cerberus.

CERBERUS is part of one of the signature Wall Street businesses of the past decade: private equity. Buyout kings like Mr. Feinberg, 51, try to acquire undervalued companies, often with borrowed money, fix them up and either take them public or sell at a profit to someone else....

Why Cerberus went after gun companies isn’t clear. Many private investment firms shy away from such industries to avoid scaring off big investors like pension funds.

Yet, in many ways, the move is classic Cerberus. Mr. Feinberg has a history of investing in companies that other people may not want, but that Cerberus believes it can turn around. When Cerberus embarked on its acquisition spree in guns, it essentially had the field to itself.

If Democrats and pundits really wanted to put the onus on the Republican party side of the Duopoly for the rise in white supremacist gun violence, they might point out that former Vice President Dan Quayle sat on the board of Cerberus in Freedom Group era, and is still in charge of "global investments." The Board has also included a couple of retired generals, who during its ownership of Bushmaster facilitated the sale of assault rifles to the US military as well as to the burgeoning demographic including all the many varieties of disturbed or propagandized civilians of the United States.

Cerberus changed the name of Freedom Group to the more innocuous "Remington Outdoor Company" after a great public outcry, post- Sandy Hook shootings. Ironically, the father of the Cerberus CEO himself had lived in a gated community in Sandy Hook.

The younger Feinberg, with a net worth of $1.5 billion, was named by Donald Trump to chair the President's Intelligence Advisory Board. Cerberus then owned DynCorp, a major contractor with the American security state, which then got folded into another private security contractor, called Amentum. Under Trump Freiberg was tasked with "vetting" people employed by the CIA, despite having no "intelligence" experience himself.

Meanwhile, the latest listed owner of the Bushmaster assault rifle company is Crotalus Holdings in Sun City, Nevada, whose rather murky official trademark is "Proud To Stand With America's Finest."

It still has the same old friendly cartoon logo, an over-fanged blood-red snake with a gun.

From the company website:

Bushmaster Firearms™ is excited to announce our return. We are not an affiliate with any other firearms manufacturing companies. In times to come, our array of products will provide Proven™ perfection to all.

And just in case, despite the outlandish trademarking of the word "Proven," you still thought that the Bushmaster and all its assorted ammo and gear are violent things being recklessly marketed to one and all, they are deadly serious about putting the missionary back in the Mission. The quote on the bottom of the web page selling assault rifles should prove™ it to everyone's satisfaction:  

 Bushmaster Firearms™

Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
Matthew 5:9

Cheats and Tweets (and Cheetos)

To mangle T.S. Eliot, this is the way the world ends, folks - not with the bang of nuclear World War III, but with the whimper of a tweet.  Elon Musk, the world's richest billionaire whose very name exudes rank ferality, just bought Twitter and is taking it private.

The corporate media monolith and of course the Twitterverse itself are in a veritable frenzy of belching out What This All Means. If you look on the bright side of things, Musk promises that the algorithm, which now favors some users over others, will become open-source. The methods of our manipulation will be visible to one and all. The Musk oil salesman will teach us to embrace the new freedom of our servitude. Dissidents will no longer be banned or censored.... unless, of course, they reside in either the Ten Percent Far Right or the Ten Percent Far Left, which shall be defined by Elon Musk himself so as to conduct censorship in the most libertarian and transparent way possible.

And if, as diehard users fear, Twitter devolves from its current high-minded civility into such a free-for-all Babel that nobody can even hear himself Tweet, shouldn't we view it as a respite rather than a tragedy? This is especially true if it is deemed unusable and/or untouchable by the ruling class influencers and scolders who currently manufacture and control the "discourse" and the "narrative." Or, Elon Musk could suddenly become bored and shut the whole enterprise down on a whim, but in such an ironclad patented legal way that nobody else can ever revive it in any form whatsoever.

Alternatively, if the ruling class twitterati find themselves simply unable to quit Twitter, they at least might finally be spurred to follow through on their heretofore flimsy threats to hold it, and all the remaining social media giants, legally accountable for the material they allow to be published on their platforms. The elites might even become so desperate that they seize the companies altogether and place them in the public domain, just like our other for-profit public utllities, such as life-sustaining water.

Elon Musk may own the world, but as a person born outside of these United States of non-Usian parents, he at least can never buy the actual presidency - notwithstanding the fact that he and his oligarchic cohort effectively own the government - otherwise known as privatized profit at socialized cost. 

As you may have gathered by now, I don't care one whit about Twitter and its future. I did mindlessly sign up for it when it first appeared, but I abysmally failed at tweeting out even one single tweet. 

If Twitter disappears, as I sincerely hope that it does, journalists will actually have to write articles whose paragraphs are separated by plain indentations instead of those ubiquitous, supposedly pithy Tweets or at minimum, numerous links to Tweets themselves. Following these links only requires me to register in order to read them. And life is way too short as it is, especially with Hitler Putin threatening to nuke us or at least mess with our power grid, at which time the existential angst of whether to tweet or not to tweet while obsessing over followers and ratios will be rendered absolutely moot.

In other news, Big Oil is paradoxically balking at Joe Biden's kind offer to drill baby drill the whole world into extinction. The reason? The oil companies are afraid they won't be able to keep fuel prices high and their profits higher if they extract too much.  Or as the New York Times explains it, 

The biggest reason oil production isn’t increasing is that U.S. energy companies and Wall Street investors are not sure that oil prices will stay high long enough for them to make a profit from drilling lots of new wells. Many remember how abruptly and sharply oil prices crashed two years ago, forcing companies to lay off thousands of employees, shut down wells and even seek bankruptcy protection.

Who knew that greed had its upside as far as the environment is concerned? Perhaps our lawmakers can stop subsidizing these companies and the courts can stop offering them bankruptcy protection even as they pocket their windfall profits from price-gouging during times of war and plague.

One more bit of good-bad news before I go. PepsiCo, which  owns the Frito-Lay division of junk food as well as its diabetes-causing sugary sodas, reports that its own profits have risen only modestly, those rises being due solely to the obscene price increases it has recently plopped on its products. In other words, if they hadn't raised the price of Cheetos and Lays potato chips so drastically, then they would be in the hole. Or, to put in Timesplaining-speak:

Like other food and beverage companies, PepsiCo is walking a fine line, determining how much it can raise prices on its key products before consumers balk and either buy less or seek out cheaper substitutes. Still, acknowledging that consumers are facing higher prices in all aspects of their lives, executives said they would be watching behaviors closely as they weigh further price increases for the year.

So that makes me wonder whether the real reason that Netflix is losing so many subscribers is that the high cost of noshing while watching has forced people to make the hard choice to just give up the watching, which is much less addictive than sugar and salt. And pretty soon they won't be able to afford the noshing either. Cheetos already are threatening to become a delicacy affordable only by the board members of Exxon-Mobil, Twitter, Netflix and PepsiCo itself.

And with the prospect of losing access to Twitter for lack of the bitcoin price that Elon Musk is said to intend charging for the service, without the gas to drive their cars to the grocery store to buy the Cheetos, without the cash to pay to watch Netflix cake-baking shows, without, perhaps, even the electricity to plug our devices in to achieve blissful forgetfulness  this overreach by the voracious class of capitalist greedsters might be just the thing that we need to survive as a species... if, of course, they don't kill us, their hosts, first with their own addiction to endless war.

"Hey You, Get Under My Bus" - photo by Kat Garcia

Fog of War, Brain Fog of Warmongers

I guess we could look on the bright side of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's Covid diagnosis this week. She will be forced to postpone her provocative trip to Taiwan, which is the next apparent site of the US hegemon's "bait and bleed" operation to stop their global competitors (Russia and China, for now) right in their economic tracks by goading them into wars against their weaker neighbors.  Even the risk of nuclear war is not preventing the American gerontocracy from trying to maintain their increasingly tenuous status as Sole Remaining Superpower.

Of course, the really bad news about Pelosi's diagnosis is that even though she smugly boasts of having the emerging elite strain of the disease (she feels great because she is uber-boosted!), research clearly shows that she still is at risk for the brain fog and other sequelae in Long Covid. And since, at 82 years of age, her increasingly incoherent speech patterns might also be indicative of mental decline, the prospect of a post-Covid Pelosi traveling the globe seems especially dangerous.

It's not as though she and her cohort were not already certifiably insane. Their seemingly deliberate ploys to infect their unmasked selves at various self-congratulatory galas in the past week, and then to tweet out cheery messages of how well they're feeling and how noble they're being by isolating themselves, comprise an obvious public relations gimmick to goad the rest of us into following suit. Never mind that the elites get paid when they're out sick and have the insurance and unlimited tests and medications and wait-staff to make it all so tolerable and brag-worthy.

 The exquisite irony of them even cavalierly exposing themselves to the disease at a White House celebration of the Affordable Care Act should especially not be lost on us.

As PBS approvingly gushed,

Obama returns to the White House on Tuesday for a moment he can savor. His signature Affordable Care Act is now part of the fabric of the American health care system, and President Joe Biden is looking to extend its reach. Sign-ups under the health law have increased under Biden’s stewardship, and more generous taxpayer subsidies have cut costs for enrollees, albeit temporarily.

Didn't anybody ever tell them that stretching delicate fabric will decrease its life expectancy, if not completely ruin it?

This latest bit of White House theater is downright cruel, given that Congress has yet to renew free Covid testing and treatment for the tens of millions of uninsured citizens - the disproportionately black, brown and poor people who already were disproportionately dying from the disease - and they've agreed among themselves not to renew Covid relief for the rest of the war-torn and climate change-torn world. They seem to think there's an invisible barrier protecting the Homeland from non-American virus particles, which must be absolutely thrilled that they're being allowed to keep thriving and mutating and sneaking past Border Patrol.

For as Shakespeare observed in Hamlet,

“I do repent; but heaven hath pleas’d it so

To punish me with this, and this with me,

That I must be their scourge and minister.

I will bestow him, and will answer well

The death I gave him. So again good night

I must be cruel only to be kind.

Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.”

To divert us from the crass ingratitude that we might be feeling during these times of financial distress, meanwhile, we are supposed to cheer for the bipartisan confirmation of the first female black Supreme Court justice, revel in Congress's heroic federal criminalization of lynching, and celebrate Joe Biden's historic proclamation of the Transgender Day of Visibility. None of this political theater will do a damn thing to make people's lives better. In fact, the sheer insanity of the ruling elite will make our lives exponentially worse with every passing, cynical gesture. 

Another example of cynical kindness is Biden's extension of the student loan moratorium only through September, when he has it in his power to declare a full-scale debt jubilee and permanently forgive the loans. However, since the elites declare that such a jubilee would also unfairly reward the subset of well-educated debtors making a decent salary, they scold that permanent forgiveness would be a slap in the face to other struggling workers. Cruelty is thus conveniently redefined as kindness to the "deserving" - while the only true winners are the rent-seeking, debt-free oligarchs.

 Cruel kindness/kind cruelty  can be taken away at any moment, making the month-to-month brand of relief arguably more stressful for the desperate than a complete cutoff of help would be.

And then there is the temporary increase in SNAP (food stamp) benefits, extended last year under the Families First Act. In order for recipients to qualify for a second monthly federal stipend of as much as several hundred dollars depending on family size, each state must make a monthly application for a "flexibility" waiver from the Department of Agriculture. This availability applies only for as long as federal and state public health emergencies are continued. Not knowing from one month to the next whether or not the supplemental grant to buy increasingly costly groceries will be forthcoming makes it difficult for families to budget from one month to the next. North Carolina just became the first state to officially cut off the supplemental SNAP benefits to recipients in that state, just at a time when food prices are rising so drastically.

This week's orchestrated super-spreader event to mark Obamacare - complete with the Great Man himself deigning to show up to "savor the moment" as if it was foie gras sadistically whipped up from the livers of tortured geese - would not have been complete without another adorable Joe Biden gaffe. This is what he tweeted out to celebrate a tiny revision of the law, which allows previously excluded family members with pre-existing conditions to begin purchasing insurance product next year - provided, of course, that they have the financial means to do so.

President Biden

@POTUS

United States government official

In America, health care should be a right — not a privilege.

The fact-checked, corrected version:

In America, health care is a right only for the privileged. 

 

Foie Gras For Me. Expiring Cheez Whiz For Thee