With God On Their Side

Has anything ever encapsulated US history better than the sight of Donald Trump fomenting violence while holding an upside-down Bible against a backdrop of flash grenades and assault troops?

The Bible, which had been carefully nestled within Ivanka Trump's $1500 designer handbag for the fascistic fashion parade from the Rose Garden to St. John's Episcopal Church on Monday night, amazingly did not erupt into flames once it became weaponized in Trump's hammy fist.

Nor did Washington's Pius XII shrine spontaneously combust in outrage when Trump desecrated that site the following day in an oafish appeal to the Opus Dei Catholic side of his reactionary base. Perhaps it's because, as just-released Vatican documents disclose, the pope was both aware of and complicit in Hitler's extermination of the Jews. The pope learned of the Holocaust fully three years before the rest of the world, but kept silent.

Not to be outdone by Trump in the great American tradition of complicity and the co-optation of religion to hide the Seven Deadly Sins that define our brutal and oligarchic form of government, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wielded her own Bible in response to the president's serial heresies, lamely chiding him to start acting out the traditional presidential role of Healer in Chief.

Seeming to channel children's author and fellow San Franciscan Lemony Snicket, Pelosi bemoaned the series of unfortunate events which, for her, culminated in the atrocity of Trump holding a Bible. She advised him to tone down the divisive rhetoric. But she herself was as silent as a Pope in World War Two about the ongoing protests and police brutality in the streets of America. She would not be cowed into finally advocating Medicare for All and a universal basic income as a way of quelling the near-universal public anger against the establishment of which she is an all-powerful part.

She noted, quoting Ecclesiastes, that there is a time to love and a time to heal. You could almost hear the refrains of Turn, Turn, Turn wafting in the air. But combined with her utter lack of response to the economic and social pain of the protesters themselves, it was just more of the same Turn of the Screw.

Not to be outdone in the religious co-optation department, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden followed up his own churchy advice that rioting, stressed-out cops should aim to shoot those hordes of mythical knife-branding criminals in the legs rather than the hearts. He virtuously suggested that next time, Trump should actually open the Bible and learn something. He did not suggest that US police departments open up the Bill of Rights for their own refresher courses in law and morality.

That's because Joe Biden, author of the 1994 Crime Bill, has always been totally copacetic with cops. Barack Obama himself gushed on more than one occasion that Cop-dom has never had a better or truer friend than Joe Biden. It was Biden who restored billions of dollars of funding to the federal COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services) program as part of the 2009 stimulus package - at the very same time that the administration was helping Wall Street to throw five million citizens out of their homes. It was Biden who spearheaded the 2012 policy requiring that grants must be used by police departments to hire military veterans - to give them a chance to continue "serving our country" - rather than, say, to protect the citizenry - once they're done fighting "over there."

The COPS legislation, written by Biden in tandem with the crime bill, began funneling billions of dollars to police departments to hire more cops under the rubric of "community policing" and "proactive community engagement."  But as Radley Balko writes in Rise of the Warrior Cop:

"The problem was that there was no universal definition of community policing.... Street sweeps, occupation-like control of neighborhoods, SWAT raids and aggressive anti-gang policies. These police activities are aggressive, often violent, and usually a net loss for civil liberties, but they are proactive.

When (President) Clinton, Biden and other politicians touted the COPs program, they did so with language that evoked the Peace Corps (though both Clinton and Biden supported policies that promoted militarization.) Although Clinton described the goal of COPS as '(building) bonds of trust and understanding, it wasn't clear if he or any other politician really believed this. The majority of the COPS grants was given to simply hire more  police officers. The program said little about how those officers would be used, or what sort of attitude they should bring to the job....

"And so as the COPS program threw billions at police departments under the pretense of hiring whistling, baton-twirling Officer Friendlies to walk neighborhood beats, rescue kittens, and maybe guest-umpire the occasional Little League game, many police agencies were actually using the money to militarize."

The difference between Democrats and Republicans is largely one of style over substance, The George W. Bush administration drastically cut funding to the COPS program, because its language wasn't as tough and brutal as they liked. When Obama came into office, the funding was duly restored. When Trump came into the office, the funding was duly slashed once again. If Biden comes into office in 2021, watch for the language of touchy-feely community to gloss over more cop killings of minorities, more deadly no-knock raids, more hiring of PTSD-riddled veterans of our endless wars. He'll sell it as a vast improvement over Trump's calling out the troops before they even get a chance to jump seamlessly from the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines to trade their fatigues for a blue uniform and a badge.

As a senator, Biden was actually to the right of the Bush administration, never resting from his one-man crusade for COPS. From a 2007 press release from his Senate office:

My colleagues on the Judiciary Committee have unanimously approved this bill. Recently, the Brookings Institution strongly advocated for a reauthorization of the COPS program, calling it one of the most cost-effective options available for fighting crime. They can see what is plainly obvious crime is like cutting grass and if you stop mowing the lawn, one day you'll look outside and see a jungle. We're seeing very tall grass in our communities now, and we need to move this bill to the full Senate quickly, so can get local police agencies the help they so desperately need.

Biden effectively compared poor minority communities to wild overgrown jungles needing a severe mow-down. It is a prime example of the racist dog-whistle.

Not to be outdone, his Democratic primary challenger at the time, Barack Obama, traveled to New Orleans to advocate for his own "Katrina COPS" program to "empower" poor black residents of that destroyed city to install more police to occupy their neighborhoods. Not for nothing did he eventually choose Biden to be his vice president, a dog-whistle of reassurance to paranoid white voters in its own right. Like any other liberal God-sider worth his salt, Obama preached from within the sanctuary of a church for the hiring more cops to "restore the bonds of trust" between an occupying force and its targets.

More blatantly militant language and practice did eventually find their way into the COPS program, particularly the 2012 directive mandating that departments use the grant money to hire military veterans over even graduates with criminal justice degrees from four year universities. 

By the time Donald Trump assumed control of the government, one out of every five American cops was a true warrior, a veteran of Iraq, Afghanistan and any number of other battlefields and occupation zones both acknowledged and secret.

So even as a "bipartisan" Congress is currently going through the motions of taking away some of the tanks and grenade launchers and other surplus military hardware from the nations's police departments, they are not addressing the proliferation of trained killers in these departments.

A 2017 investigation by the Marshall Project revealed that veterans who work as police officers are more vulnerable to self-destructive behavior, including using alcohol and drugs, and attempting suicide.

Nearly all of the 33 police departments contacted by The Marshall Project declined to provide a list of officers who had served in the military, citing laws protecting personnel records, or saying the information was not stored in any central place. The Justice Department office that dispenses grants to hire cops and study policing said it has no interest in funding research into how military experience might influence police behavior.

 “I reject the notion that a returning veteran, who has seen combat, should cause concern for a police chief,” said Ronald L. Davis, who headed that office in the Obama administration. “I would even hire more if I could.”

Take a look out on the streets of America. It's a Hieronymus Bosch mural of a uniformed, untreated culture of PTSD sufferers with clubs on steroids in military Humvees.

And all our esteemed alleged leaders can do is praise the lord and pass the ammunition and place trillions of public dollars into the collection baskets of their oligarchic friends and donors.

Trump is far from the only miscreant who, wrapped in the flag and thumping a Bible, is bringing fascism to America. That process started a long time ago. 

The Pandemic of Structural Violence

The Powers That Be are probably ruing the day they prematurely ended the pandemic lockdown. That is because they no longer have any legal grounds to order protesters off the streets and highways and back into their homes. All they have is tear gas and rubber bullets... and if comes to it, real bullets, tanks and drones.

The fully one-fourth of the national workforce that is now officially unemployed finally have the time for a brand new job. And that job is to vent their fury at the political officials who have made most people's lives a living hell long before the Coronavirus ever showed up to throw capitalism into such a state of disarray. 

The tipping point for many was the broad-daylight Memorial Day police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Just as Congress hasn't bothered to hide its own massive and criminal multitrillion-dollar giveaway to the rich under the cynically-named Cares Act, the officers didn't bother hiding their own public execution of Floyd from a crowd of distraught onlookers, their cell phone cameras whirring. Is the police knee pressing on Floyd's neck and squeezing the life out of the man really all that different from Nancy Pelosi's stiletto heel squeezing all hope of health care, guaranteed housing, food assistance and direct cash aid from hundreds of millions of American citizens?

It's considered chic for both liberals and never-Trump conservatives to foist most, if not all, of the blame for 100,000 Covid-19 deaths in the United States on his administration, while they ostentatiously wring their hands over his dangerous tweeted medical advice. But it was New York Governor Andrew Cuomo who closed city hospitals and cut Medicaid funding before refusing to shut down the state for weeks after the virus had already started spreading like wildfire. It was Cuomo who absolved nursing homes of accountability before he sent elderly hospital patients to their deaths at these state-sanctioned warehouses for the disposable. It was Cuomo who appeared on the floor of the Stock Exchange the day after the Floyd killing to maniacally cheer the opening bell of profit and greed even as his constituents stand in line for hours for meager pickings from food banks. It was Cuomo who has refused to give relief to renters even as his legislature plans to bail out the state's landlords, using the tax money paid by New York's potential evictees.

Of course, they all mouth the necessary platitudes and they feebly call for justice for George Floyd even as their own hands are caked with decades' worth of dirt and blood.

If they immediately fire the bad cops and even charge them with murder when faced with incontrovertible evidence of their guilt, they think they can absolve themselves. But the fact is that the police are in essence mere servants of the oligarchs. They act as a buffer zone between the poor and the rich. The plutocracy draws its domestic armed forces not from within its own class, but from the ranks of the working poor, integrating them into its program of economic and political oppression. Police forces are the low-intensity (usually) military ops for the elites.

It's a class war and it's a race war, and it's all right out there in the open. Racist dog-whistles are quaint relics. The Trump-style bullhorn has officially evolved into the state-sponsored snuff film.

Of course, the political-media complex strives mightily to reframe their deliberate policies as a culture war, pitting various segments of the working class and underclass against one another. In Minneapolis, we see self-described rednecks with shaved heads guarding convenience stores against "looting" by black people. Pick a side, and it will take your mind off the real looting of the treasury and the commons by the billionaires and corporations. 

 Neighborhoods on the elite chopping block have been transformed into military Human Terrain Systems. CCTV at every intersection allows real instances of urban violence to supplement the fictional fare that Hollywood produces to frighten us into submission. If citizens can envision urban areas and housing projects as hotbeds of savagery, then citizens can also accept more police and more jails. It's an endless propaganda feedback loop, in which both the cognitively superior "liberal" elites and the fundamentalist right-wingers are manipulated into joining forces in their hatred of the "Other". One side calls them IQ-deficient gun-loving losers in need of a hand up rather than a handout. The other side calls them godless moochers and takers lolling about on their hammocks of dependency.

And the elites meanwhile moan and groan about why can't "we" just all get along, because "we" are all in this together. If you call them out, you're being "divisive."

Any day now, they will declare a victory in their valiant fight against racism by organizing a cocktail summit between the paranoid white "Karen" and the black bird-watcher whose upper middle class Central Park confrontation was the top story before the Minneapolis police execution spurred even Donald Trump to call for FBI intervention.

Meanwhile, here are your two pre-approved "lock em up" choices in the coming election. As Biden advised in a 1994 Senate speech touting his Jim Crow crime bill, "we shouldn't really care why they are sociopaths."

All we should care about is the sad truth that each contender for the highest office is a sociopath who is shamelessly courting the votes of the very same people they've spent their entire long careers demeaning, robbing, cheating and oppressing.

Once In Love With Bernie....

 The reputation and standing of Bernie Sanders within the Democratic Party is more important to him than his delegates' First Amendment rights to free speech. Therefore, in hopes of avoiding another outbreak of democratic protest against another rigging of another primary election, the Sanders campaign is demanding that his hundreds of delegates sign a pledge to never, ever publicly "attack" presumptive nominee Joe Biden or any other party bigwig. They must also never disparage mainstream journalists, consultants, cable news shows and party spokespeople.

As a delegate who worked his or her heart out for Bernie, anything you say, or any independent thought that you publicly express, is as good as coming from the mouth of Bernie himself. As such, according to the warning salvo:

 “Before tweeting or posting from your personal social media accounts,ask yourself these questions: If this appeared on the front page of The New York Times, would it compromise Bernie Sanders’s message, credibility, or reputation? Could it potentially risk your standing as a delegate? When re-tweeting or sharing information from others, are you applying necessary skepticism?”

His team is also asking that each delegate sign a nondisclosure agreement, lest any revolution that is not a slogan be televised, live-streamed, shared on social media,  written on comment boards and Internet chat rooms in any way, shape, or form. Refusal to promise to keep your mouth shut will pre-empt your participation in the convention.  If you break the agreement by, for instance, merely talking to a reporter or tweeting a renegade thought while at the convention, you will be kicked out. You may not take candid photos backstage or at "closed press events."

These admonitions presuppose that there will be an actual physical convention as the Covid-19 pandemic rages on and Joe Biden has yet to emerge from his basement bunker.  

If you do go to the live or virtual convention and breach the agreement that you signed, you must immediately surrender to the proper authorities and fess up. To wit:

"If you believe you have made a substantive mistake, alert staff on the Delegates Team to determine a course of action. Deleting something does not make it go away. Do not take action before consulting the Delegates Team."

And you must also promise to snitch on your fellow Bernie delegates if you discover them exercising their First Amendment rights without prior approval. At the same time, you must promise not to retaliate against anyone - say, a Biden delegate - who chooses to exercise his or her own First Amendment rights by acting confrontational or rude. You must turn the other cheek and remain silent, as is your right whenever you're arrested and handcuffed.

Although he has suspended his campaign, Sanders remains on the ballot in remaining primary states in the belief that the more muzzled, cowed delegates that he can amass, the more leverage he will exert over Biden and the corporate wing of the party. Actually, with few progressives even raising an eyebrow over the most massive congressional transfer of wealth to the already wealthy under the CARES Act, is there any other wing but the right-wing, corporate one?

As the Washington Post reports, his strict rules against free speech are angering some of Bernie's delegates. One of them already broke the rules by leaking the five pages of rules to the newspaper, without obtaining the express prior permission of the Sanders campaign.

So we'll have to wait and see whether Bernie Sanders's confident prediction that "at the end of the day, they'll be voting for Joe Biden" comes to pass.

His streak of authoritarianism probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise, since earlier this month he didn't even bother showing up to be the one necessary vote to block Senate passage of an expanded Patriot Act,  which allows the FBI to search your internet search history without a warrant. In effect, it allows what Bernie calls "the most dangerous president in history" to legally spy on you for any reason at all.

Bernie Sanders is refusing to comment or even say where he was during the crucial vote, which wielded one more death blow to what is left of our democracy and the Fourth Amendment.

Maybe he signed a pledge or non-disclosure agreement.

Wink, Nod, Bump, Grind, Repeat

Fast Times At Covid Corporate High

It was hard to miss Saturday night's glitzy Graduate Together show broadcast in primetime over all the commercial TV and cable networks, and live-streamed on Facebook, Youtube and many other social media platforms.

 Its marquee attraction was former President Barack Obama, whose virtual commencement address to the nation's quarantined high school seniors was covered as a major political news event by the corporate media. (It followed a separate address, sponsored by JP Morgan Chase, to graduates of the nation's Historically Black Colleges.)

Obama's performance was augmented by song and dance routines and motivational speeches by students who had entered to win a spot in what might be called the Bootstraps Inspiration Sweepstakes. One girl gushed about her success being the result of a heroic mother working three jobs to pay her college tuition. The lesson this student learned was not that no parent should ever have to work three jobs, or that no student should ever be in onerous college debt, Her message was that it is incumbent upon the youth of America to "demand more" and show up to vote for politicians who will also pay proper verbal respect to hard-working parents like hers.

Although our disrespectful and disrespected current president was never mentioned by name, a distinct anti-Trump current ran right though the High School Musical program. The liberal politics of orchestrated diversity and slick entertainment and inspiring vignettes served to distract the audience from the true, underlying agenda and profit motive of the show.

A joint project of Hollywood's Entertainment Industry Foundation (ETF), the XQ Institute and the LeBron James Family Foundation,, the show's occult purpose was to gin up public enthusiasm for the complete oligarchic control of our public school systems. It was one giant infomercial for school privatization.

As the Jonas Brothers crooned, and activist Malala Yousafsai championed the rights of female students, a scrolling chyron at the bottom of the screen urged viewers to visit a "Rethinking High School" website. One click brought you to the XQ Foundation,  a think tank bankrolled by billionaire Apple heiress Laurene Powell Jobs and led by former Obama administration officials and investment bankers and hedge fund operators.

It's just another variation on the same old refrain from those smash capitalistic hit jobs on public education and teachers known as No Child Left Behind and Race To the Top. 

Following the neoliberal mantra of never letting a serious crisis go to waste, ETF CEO Nicole Sexton told Variety that Obama's participation in the infomercial was neither the surprise nor the altruistic rare treat that corporate media had been promoting it as:

 "We have a long-standing relationship with XQ Institute, which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to challenging traditional education platforms and ways of teaching. This period of time has taken that to a whole other level. But through XQ’s networks, there were a number of students and educators and families across the country who expressed sadness about the missed opportunity to experience the wonderful rites of passage tied to high school graduation. XQ came to us and said, “Let’s talk through what we could do with a telecast,” and we took that to our board.

 We have 11 board members, four of whom are executives for the four major networks. It was instantaneous. They all got so excited. There were a lot of people recognizing that there are going to be seniors who will miss these wonderful rites of passage and asking, “How do we fill that void in a way that really celebrates them?” So our networks at the national level had been exploring different ideas. And then when that opportunity came to them with a formidable partner like XQ, it was literally a no-brainer for them. Within an hour, they came back and said, “Yeah, we want to do this as a roadblock.” And within 24 hours, I had the date.

The CEO of the XQ Institute is Rosslyn Ali, former deputy Obama education secretary for civil rights. Its parent organization, the Emerson Collective, is managed by former Education Secretary Arne Duncan, author of Obama's punitive Race To the Top initiative, as well being Rosslyn Ali's current and former boss.

The XQ Institute uses the same obfuscatory vocabulary to hide its for-profit motives as other finance capital-backed school "reform" initiatives run by such billionaire luminaries as Bill and Melinda Gates and the Walton Family Foundations. 

As school privatization critic Diane Ravitch outlined several years ago in her book Reign of Error, common tropes are that public schools are failing, that mainly poor and minority children are "trapped" in these failing schools, that unionized teachers are not up to the challenge of training children for the "jobs of the future," that there exists a "skills gap" in the job marketplace that unionized teachers cannot bridge, and that if only we can bring some of the same good old market-based creative destruction (closures) to schools as private equity brings to business in order to "rescue" them, then all might be well. And be sure to use the word "choice" in every other sentence, as though you actually had one.

To further hide the gross profit motive of placing education of children into the hands of greedy and unqualified venture capitalists and oligarchs, education reform cultists also commonly and cynically frame their agenda as "the civil rights issue of our time." 

Ravitch continues:

"Their policies, they say, will make our children into 'global competitors.' They will protect our national security. They will make America strong again. The corporate reformers play to our anxieties, even rekindling dormant Cold War fears that we may be in for jeopardy as a nation of we don't buy what they are selling. The critics want the public to believe that our public schools are a clear and present danger to our society. Unless there is radical change, they say, our society will fall apart. Our economy will collapse. Our national security is in danger."

And these are the people who complain that Donald Trump is the guy who brought fascism to the country. How convenient. What a gift both Trump and the coronavirus pandemic are giving to the school privatization movement. 

Due to the pandemic, there's been been a slight change in plans and a tweak in the propaganda delivery. Since society has already failed and the economy has already collapsed right before our eyes, the new message to investors is that Remote Learning Is Fun and Profitable. 

All that America's education policy makers have to do is dream and imagine the possibilities. And the XQ Institute is here to help with its pharmacopoeia of hallucinatory drugs.

One of the first steps is to do away with democratically elected local school boards - or at least, to seed them with XQ-funded candidates. This is euphemized on their website as " empowering local communities." Their accompanying illustration is thus one of clenched fists rising in protest against traditional schools.

Speaking directly to local and state legislators and governors, XQ waves wads of money to legions of innovators in contests to redesign their local high schools to neoliberal expectations. A big part of freeing students from the schools they are trapped in is in getting them unpaid internships for the jobs of the future - or "Innovation Schools."

What could be more radical and innovative than never re-opening the shuttered schools at all in favor of remote learning and de facto serfdom - or opening them at vastly reduced physical capacity? Think of the real estate. Not for nothing are the boards of directors of reform organizations rife with property developers and real estate magnates. 

If you watched Saturday's graduation show and clicked on the incessant advertisement link to XQ, you were treated to an avalanche of reform Newspeak that would bury even George Orwell. The language is that turgid and uninformative. You will be led down endless alleys and mazes in search of the perfect Covid Academy merchandise and tips.

One such link is to an outfit called Envision Learning Partners. The essence of this experience begins a mission statement in ALL CAPS. Because, let's face it, by the time you find your way to this site via the long and windy road that XQ has provided for you via the gala star-studded TV graduation special, your eyes are already glazed over. An example of school reform Newspeak:

ENVISION LEARNING PARTNERS (ELP) EMPOWERS SCHOOL AND DISTRICT LEADERS TO BUILD A SUPPORTIVE CULTURE OF LEARNING BY DESIGNING SYSTEMS OF PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT THAT ENCOURAGE STUDENTS AND TEACHERS TO LEARN AND GROW TOGETHER. WE BELIEVE THIS APPROACH CONTRIBUTES TO GREATER EQUITY IN EDUCATION—MAKING SURE EVERY STUDENT HAS REAL CHOICES AND POWER OVER THEIR OWN FUTURE

In other words, Teach to the Test. Pandemic or no pandemic, keep rating teachers as failures if their students from poverty stricken neighborhoods don't score well. And with Zoom replacing the classroom, they are guaranteed not to do well. In the small print at the bottom of the page  Envision finally sees fit to divulge that it is a for-profit charter school conglomerate in the business of selling test-taking kits to teachers and school districts who must buy them if they are to succeed in the Education Marketplace. They need a lot of 'elp.

For as Barack Obama advised graduating seniors in the keynote address of Disaster Capitalism's gala graduation party:

Doing what feels good, what’s convenient, what’s easy — that’s how little kids think. Unfortunately, a lot of so-called grown-ups, including some with fancy titles and important jobs, still think that way — which is why things are so screwed up.... >When you need help, Michelle and I have made it the mission of our Foundation to give young people like you the skills and support to lead in your own communities, and to connect you with other young leaders around the country and around the globe.

He might as well have been speaking his empowering message into the un-monetized wind. Before Covid-19 struck, socialism was just as popular as capitalism among the young adults surveyed. People both young and old still have their brains and they still have their eyes to envision what myriad and deliberate screw-ups that the lords of unfettered capitalism truly are.

Here's the commencement address that should be broadcast far and wide. As Marxist economist Richard Wolff argues, what we need is not a glitzy graduation show or remote learning-by-oligarch. During this national lockdown, what we need is an education reform program that would pair millions of jobless but eminently skilled and qualified professionals from many fields with millions of quarantined students. The sessions would be one-on-one, the teachers would be paid by the government, and the students would not be indebted for life.

That's how reimagining and rethinking high school - or any school or functional democracy, for that matter - would ideally sound.

Neoliberalism Stinks

I got a weird phone call on Saturday afternoon from a guy who said he had just left a "medicine delivery" at my front door. Since I don't take prescription drugs, I was puzzled. But in a brief burst of the same kind of wishful magical thinking that has taken the ruling class by storm, I thought that maybe some Good Samaritan had left me a bag of marijuana along with the thrice-weekly meal deliveries I've been getting from my county's "Project Resiliency" program.

So when I opened the door only to discover a beautiful Mothers Day bouquet from my son, I thought that I must be finally losing my hearing as well as my mind. Then I read the name of the florist on the attached card - "Meadow Scent."  My hearing was still more or less intact! Then I started to worry anew, because when I thrust my nose into the little red flowers and yellow tulip buds, I could not discern any meadow scent let alone any aroma whatsoever. Was my smell going? Was I exhibiting the first telltale symptom of Covid-19?

I suppressed that thought, and called my son on Face Time to thank him. Suddenly the room started to spin. But it was only my just-turned-two granddaughter gaining control of the phone so that I could converse with her dolls. Which I did.  For quite some time.

The next day, I got a "Happy Mothers Day" email from one of this blog's readers, in which I was cheerfully referred to an article about the "real" Lord of the Flies. Much to my edification and relief, it chronicled the adventures of a group of Tongan boys who, bored with their parochial school routine, ditched classes in favor of a nautical joy ride that culminated in their being marooned on a small Pacific island for more than a year. Contra the Hobbesian plot of the grim William Golding novel, these boys survived by dint of mutual aid, and cooperation. But when they were finally rescued, they were not completely celebrated for their resourcefulness and courage. They were briefly jailed for having stolen and wrecked the boat they used for their escape.

It's the kind of crazy reaction being leveled against the nurses who are fired for speaking out against the working conditions in our for-profit health care marketplaces, or for wearing unapproved protective gear as they work double overtime shifts saving the lives of pandemic victims.

It's why multiple generations of American high school students who are taught that history is nothing but a series of endless wars and cutthroat competition and who never learn the meaning of "civics" are forced to read "Lord of the  Flies" in English class.  I had to read it, my children had to read it. We all hated it. When my daughter was a sophomore, her reading assignment over the Christmas break was... you guessed it. The season of peace and joy was ruined by the feral antics of teenage boys and the murder of Piggy.

"All against all" has been drummed into most of us from our earliest, most susceptible formative years. It's just the way it is, people. 

So no wonder, as the British medical journal Lancet flatly reported in December 2009 on the passage of Obamacare :"Corporate influence renders the US government incapable of making policy on the basis of evidence and the public interest."

The structural social violence perpetrated against the citizenry was underway long before Donald Trump became its convenient scapegoat during this pandemic. Trump simply makes it easier for the de facto architects and enablers of a historically cruel system to look virtuous by comparison.

Now that tens of millions of American workers have lost their precarious employer-based health insurance, these anti-Trump architects and enablers are still adamantly opposed to Medicare For All. Their idea of a solution is to bail out and prop up the predatory insurance industry rather than treat patients who've already lost their jobs and livelihoods. To keep United Health Care and Blue Cross solvent, the government will shoulder hospitals' costs of Covid-19 treatment and only Covid-19 treatment - and perhaps increase Obamacare subsidies to those jobless people who were just kicked off their health insurance.

Barack Obama, in a "private" conference call with his government-in-exile last week, purported to be shocked and dismayed by Donald Trump's "chaotic" response to the pandemic:

"This election that's coming up on every level is so important because what we're going to be battling is not just a particular individual or a political party. What we're fighting against is these long-term trends in which being selfish, being tribal, being divided and seeing others as an enemy - that has become a stronger impulse in American life. And by the way, we're seeing that internationally as well," Obama was cited as saying in the private call according to Yahoo News, which said it obtained a tape of the call on Friday.
"It's part of the reason why the response to this global crisis has been so anaemic and spotty. It would have been bad even with the best of governments. It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mindset - of 'what's in it for me' and 'to heck with everybody else' - when that mindset is operationalised in our government.
"That's why, I, by the way, am going to be spending as much time as necessary and campaigning as hard as I can for Joe Biden," he said.

Obama's critique of the Trumpian "what's in it for me" Lord of the Flies ethic harkens uncomfortably back to his own personal ambitions. Chicago physician and social epidemiologist David Ansell recounts in The Death Gap a conversation he had with Obama at a 2003 fundraiser he co-hosted for him when he was running for the United States Senate:

In the living room of a modest single-family home in the neatly manicured South Shore neighborhood of Chicago, I asked the future president his position on national health care reform. His words presaged what came to be known as "Obamacare." 

"I'm a proponent of a single payer system," he responded. But he explained that the political power held by the health insurance companies was so formidable that opposing them would be political suicide.... Single payer will never get passed in the United States," he concluded.

Obama admitted that his political career trumped everything. This brand of raw selfish careerism is commonly lauded as being "realistic" or "pragmatic."

Here's some more classic Kabuki theater in which Hillary Clinton extracts a vague promise from a barely-there Joe Biden to use the pandemic to try to discuss better access to the possibility of universal health care. She ominously uses the same crisis rhetoric that former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel used to bail out Wall Street at the expense of Main Street - before proceeding to subsidize the health care industry through a bill which the insurance and pharmaceutical companies wrote.

These corporatist leaders still purport to be amazed that there exists what Ansell calls a "death gap" in America, most recently exposed by the disproportionately high Covid-19 mortality rate among black and brown people. Their contrived moment of discovery is similar to that evinced among the ruling elite when Hurricane Katrina inordinately harmed the poor people of New Orleans while those with the financial wherewithal managed to escape.

Since that disaster culminated not only in widespread death and damage and displacement, but in the complete for-profit privatization of the  city's school system, just imagine what the forced closings of our entire nation's public schools will do for predatory capitalism.  Now that the Covid-19 plague is also affecting children with a Kawasaki-type syndrome, we have to ask whether neoliberal politicians will use it as the perfect disaster capitalism excuse never to reopen them at all.

The writing certainly seems to be on the wall in New York, where Governor Andrew Cuomo has convened a task force to set the education policies of the future. Ominously called "Reimagine Education," it will involve the branded expertise of billionaire and education privateer Bill Gates and will deliberately exclude teachers, parents, current school administrators and students. This is right in the wake of Cuomo cutting billions from the state's Medicaid program right in the middle of a pandemic:

The governor’s announcement of a partnership with the Gates Foundation was immediately met with forceful opposition from New York educators and parents who are critical of the foundation’s role in developing the Common Core academic standards and linking student test scores to teacher evaluations.
Teachers were also concerned that the governor was looking for ways to supplant some in-person teaching, with the state teachers union president, Andy Pallotta, saying that “remote learning will never replace the important personal connection between teachers and their students.”

How much would you like to wager that American students will continue to be taught Lord of the Flies with the aid of a robot teacher and Bill Gates's monopolistic software?  Topics of discussion might include whether Sartre was right, and hell really is other people, and the desirability of living in enforced quarantine as isolated ants who are nevertheless all digitally connected in service to Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.  It sure beats the hell out of fear of the latest manufactured or hyped-up threat, such as murderer hornets.

With that depressingly dystopian thought, I think I'll go try to smell my flowers again. 

I only hope that enough of us wake up sooner rather than later to smell the coffee.

Capitalistic Necromancy

The Grand Re-Opening of the United States, a/k/a  global Blooperpower, will proceed despite the expected septupling of Covid-19 cases in the coming months. The death rate itself is expected to double to nearly 3,000 Americans a day by June 1st.

Call it depraved indifference to human life,call it Newgenics, call it a crime against humanity or call it genocide . All of these appellations would be correct. But the media-political complex idiots running this show are, with various degrees of rationalization and gaslighting and coercion and propaganda and magical thinking, actually celebrating the increased morbidity and mortality as the regrettable but acceptable "collateral damage" of any typical Blooperpower war for profit and democracy.

If you or a loved one is personally affected by the enhanced infection rate as a result of their cold-blooded policies, just think of yourselves as patriots who are nobly sacrificing yourselves for your country and the American Way of Life.  You wouldn't want your failure to enlist and get with the program to label you a traitor or a draft dodger, would you?

The well-padded gourmand and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie went on CNN to warn that we will simply have to "swallow the idea" of losing thousands more lives. He said that being forced into quarantine is every bit as "sad" as dying from Covid-19. I mean, if you can't  breathe while your labor is being extracted from you, then there is no point in even breathing. Buck up, you rotten bunch of death-haters and emulate of the Greatest Generation who so willingly fought and died for us in World War II. Heaven forbid that those extra hundred thousand body bags that the Trump administration so thoughtfully ordered for you went to waste, after all.

“Of course, everybody wants to save every life they can ― but the question is, towards what end, ultimately?” Christie asked. “Are there ways that we can  thread the middle here to allow that there are going to be deaths, and there are going to be deaths no matter what?”

This is the very definition of extreme centrism, or what the corporate media likes to euphemise as pragmatism or moderate politics. And if you don't like it, then you're simply being unreasonable. There is no alternative.

An internal government report obtained by the New York Times this week projects 200,000 Covid-19 new cases each day by the end of May, as compared to 34,000 daily cases now. That is a nearly seven-fold increase in less than a month. Donald Trump and his collaborators would probably characterize this as a Lucky Seven victory for them in the lottery of life. Because the house always wins. 

At least for now. How many patriots actually will stand up and say "I regret that I have only one life to give for my Trump, my Christie, my McConnell , my Pelosi, my Smithfield Farms, my Jeff Bezos?"

The Lusty Month of May

What if they opened up the economy, and nobody came?

The inhuman irony of half of US states choosing today of all days to begin easing restrictions on going back to work should not be lost on us. Forcing people back on the job on the very same day that the rest of the civilized world marks as a holiday for labor rights, when at least 63,000 citizens have already died and millions more infected, the message could not be more explicit.  

In a subverted twist on the right-wing biblical nostrum "he who does not work shall not eat," the ruling class's new improved implicit mantra is "both he who does work and he who does not work shall not only not eat,  his premature death will be his own fault whatever choice he makes. We, the Job Creators,  absolve ourselves of all legal and moral responsibility."

Since nothing must ever keep Donald Trump from his Big Macs and other artery-clogging animal flesh, he has ordered that the country's infested meat-packing plants be kept open, worker safety be damned.

The common topic of debate among the pundits and the policy-makers is not over whether to give people universal guaranteed income and health care during the pandemic. It is over how many of our deaths are worth the return of unfettered capitalism, historic wealth inequality, and unmitigated greed. 

The United States had "officially" abandoned its shameful eugenics and blatant Jim Crow policies only when our leaders realized that they had directly inspired the Nuremberg Laws and the Nazi extermination camps. Post-World War II, the American Century was declared by the victorious ruling elites whose propaganda goal was to become a kinder, gentler Imperium bringing democracy to the rest of the world and destroying the New Deal under the guise of fighting Russia and communism.

The pandemic has provided these rulers with a unique opportunity. It is accomplishing what mass sterilizations, voter disenfranchisement and cuts to social welfare programs never could.  In varying degrees of doublespeak and euphemisms, they recommend that the country "gradually" be opened up so that good old Laissez-Faire can do the trick. The fact that this pandemic is  disproportionately sickening and killing Latinos and Blacks in particular, and poor, sick and old people in general, is simply a fringe benefit for an oligarchy that has spent the last 40 years culling the American herd.

The designated working class guinea pigs of the oligarchic eugenicists are, however, refusing to go gently into that rotten night. Labor journalist Mike Elk, who has been tracking news reports of labor strikes throughout the pandemic in his Payday Report blog, notes this is no easy task, given that the pandemic has also accelerated the closings of local news outlets which otherwise would have been covering these strikes. As it is, the mainstream corporate press is accentuating astroturfed uprisings backed by right-wing groups. We are told that armed militias are out in force, demanding the right to die in the name of American economic freedom.

But as Elk reports, there have been at least 150 wildcat strikes since early March. Some have involved sick-outs, others were temporary walkouts settled almost immediately with employers.  It's as impossible to learn the true total of these labor actions as it is to know the full extent of Covid-19 morbidity and mortality in the deliberate absence of adequate testing.

And it's not just workers who are striking. It's the nation's renters. Estimates are that a third to as much as one half of tenants are unable to pay May rent, making it the largest de facto rent strike in the nation's history. Thus far, calls for a rent freeze for the duration of the pandemic have mostly fallen on deaf political ears.

As is the case with the mass wage stagnation which preceded the current unemployment crisis, the housing crisis has been brewing for a long time. The majority of low income earners were already paying more than half their wages on their rent before the pandemic threw them out of work. 

As a whole, landlords are not only not sympathetic, they are acting downright psychopathic. On a personal note, my own landlord just sent me a notice increasing my rent by 16 percent beginning on June 1st - this is on top of the 25 percent hike he levied last year to keep up with the "going market rate" in my increasingly gentrified area. Fortunately for me and other abused tenants, though, the greedster did not supply the 90 days notice now required in New York for people who have lived in their apartments longer than two years. His self-defeating flouting of the law, coupled with the state's temporary stay on evictions, at least gives me and the others some housing security for the next three months, along with the time to fight the extortionist attempt at rent-gouging.

Our solidarity with one another is our strength. And the bastards know it.

And there's no law that says we can't also be blissfully joyful as we go merrily astray, either.

Happy May Day, everybody!

Crouching Cuomo, Hidden Biden

Is the unified Biden-endorsing Democratic leadership already finessing plans to replace Uncle Joe with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo?

An email slugged "Official Democratic Poll" asking voters nationwide to share their feelings about Cuomo landed in my inbox yesterday:

"In these uncertain times where we're depending on our mayors and governors to save our lives, Andrew Cuomo has shown incredible leadership. He's doing what Trump isn't."

 Of course, the official tracking poll devised by the Stop Republicans.Org data team is essentially fund-raising spam  It's just another name for the Progressive Turnout Project, which is just another name for Progressive Takeover. It's a Chicago-based party veal pen run by a trio of former Obama and congressional campaign operatives. In order to participate in the "poll" attesting that you admire Cuomo and can't stand Donald Trump, you must first give them your money.

The phony poll could also serve double duty, though, to gauge Democratic voter support for a Cuomo run. Uncle Joe, the presumptive nominee, is carefully never even mentioned in the email.

The increasingly fragile-sounding and reclusive Biden certainly must be giving Team Obama some second thoughts. Under the guise of party unity, the manufactured positive Cuomo media coverage and name-dropping could also be the sound of them sharpening the same set of long knives they used to plunge into Bernie Sanders on that infamous South Carolina night only a few months ago.

Then again, they could simply be using Cuomo as a proxy or a magnet, drawing in more voters disenchanted with Biden, who now also faces credible sexual assault charges that he is probably too senile to even respond to personally. In contrast, we are supposed to be irresistibly drawn to a brand of authoritarian thuggery (Cuomo) that sounds a lot more erudite than Trump's ravings.

For the centrist wing of the party, Cuomo is actually too good to be true. He accomplished the single-handed feat of striking Bernie's name from the New York primary ballot before the June voting was ultimately canceled due to the coronavirus. This underhanded ploy served the dual purpose of avoiding the embarrassment of Bernie coming too close to Biden and also discouraging disappointed Sanders voters from showing up at all to cast their ballots for the progressive candidates also running for local and state offices.

Besides outright replacement of Biden, or simply using Cuomo as cover for their zombie candidate in the basement, the third possibility is that the Democrats are not so much interested in winning as they are in raising tons of money as they pretend to "resist Trump." In their cores, they love Trump. He makes their own corruption smell sweet by comparison as they give him most of what he wants. Both parties, after all, serve the same oligarchic masters.

This email push-poll spam is a new tactic for the PTP. It's set up exactly like the Republican email "polls" testing how much you love Trump and hate socialist Dems like Nancy Pelosi, who are so Marxist that they're in bed with Wall Street.

Alex Morgan, the "progressive" group's field director, told The Hill last year that his PAC's $46 million budget would be used to open 66 field offices and hire  1100 workers to knock on the doors of the 7.1 million people who did not come out to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

“We don’t waste money on TV ads, direct mail, or anything else that’s just white noise to most voters," he bragged before sending out his own blast of white noise emails this week."We can't rely on the high energy we saw in 2018 to carry over to 2020 unless we start engaging with voters now.... if we wait until September to counter Trump with field efforts, we're toast."

“We focus our efforts on what works best — multiple in-depth conversations with voters who are disillusioned with politics as usual. Democrats haven't been doing a good job of speaking to them on an intrinsic level beyond broad party platitudes, and Progressive Turnout Project is aiming to change that.”

Then Covid-19 happened. Depth conversations between voters and political canvassers would morph right into conversational death traps. So brace yourselves for what will very likely be an unprecedented and relentless onslaught of political emails engaging you on such substantive topics as The Incredible Cuomo and Be Very Afraid of Trump. The hordes of operatives must have some way to spend their hundreds of millions of dollars to extract even more hundreds of millions of dollars from you in order to live the pre-pandemic lifestyles to which they have become accustomed. 

Since even former Bernie Sanders campaign operatives have to eat, they've started their own PAC to "rally progressives" around Hidin' Biden, who "has shown a willingness to move in a more progressive direction" by deigning to allow Sanders  a bit of input in the creation of a pandemic task force operating out of Joe's basement bunker.

As proof of the progressive direction that Joe is heading, his busy little fingers typed out their own mass email Tuesday:

Hey there, I'm Joe Biden and I'm writing to you about a truly special moment in our campaign.
This afternoon, Secretary Clinton announced she's endorsing  us.  I'm so proud to have her support.

The letter is nothing but a slavish testimonial to Hillary, and how they used to have breakfast together at his vice presidential mansion when they were both in town, and how he learned how powerful she was when he didn't run for president himself. Her candidacy was so wonderful and so historic that this email reads like a de facto endorsement of a Clinton restoration. So when I clicked on the source of the encomium, it shockingly turns out it was not sent from Biden Basement Central at all, but from Onward Together - Hillary's own super pac!

His probing fingers probably didn't even write the email themselves. If they had, Joe would've inserted at least one "Here's the deal" or "I'm the guy" or "C'mon, man!"

So in the spirit of Hillary, please join Joe in the Battle For the Soul of Our Nation. Liberals are urged to tune in to the suspense of which lady will win his vice presidential beauty contest even as they lambaste Trump over his treatment of women.  Each and every one of these liberal #MeToo champions is still in it to win it despite Tara Reade, and Anita Hill before her. In fact, like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, he is using and hiding behind powerful women to defend him. Stacey Abrams, high on the list of vice presidential picks, points to the New York Times's smear piece against Tara Reade as evidence of his innocence. It's the same thing as Dick Cheney pointing to the Times articles spoon-fed by the Bushies to reporter Judith Miller as "proof" that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons.

It's also all too sickeningly reminiscent of the Democratic Party's shoddy treatment of Monica Lewinsky during the Bill Clinton scandal. You might remember that Gloria Steinem acted the same part that Stacey Abrams is now playing for Biden.

"I'm not here to ask you for money," Biden's fingers meanwhile reassure recipients in his closing policy argument. "I know first I have to earn it. So I'm asking you to think about what is at stake, give me a chance, and join my campaign."

Whereupon he only asks for money once you press the link he has so thoughtfully provided as a way to keep his word and to immediately earn your trust.

Capitalism Is a Crime Against Nature

My daily after-work zen routine used to be to retreat to my own little backyard nature sanctuary and sit as still as a statue in order to get as close as possible to the birds flocking to the multiple feeders I'd placed on the branches of our overgrown pussywillow tree.

One particularly fine afternoon as I was sitting and contemplating, a sudden shadow streaked across my peripheral vision. A hawk,with deadly and surgical and absolute lightning-speed silence, had swooped down and captured one of the hectoring bluejays fighting over sunflower seeds that had fallen to the ground. The  multiple species congregating in the tree in varying degrees of peace - finches, chickadees, nuthatches, other blue jays - did not fly away home in fright. To the contrary. They immediately sounded a deafening mutual alarm while pursuing the hawk back and forth across the yard for a good 10 minutes before at last settling back down in the feasting tree.

This memory has come back to haunt me as I've witnessed the predators of neoliberal capitalism and their political lackeys swoop down on the worst human catastrophe of our lifetimes, perhaps one of the worst of all time. But unlike the perfectly evolved hawk, our 21st century Ruling Class Raptors are nothing but grotesque, clumsy mutations. They destroy and they kill far more than they can ever personally consume in a million of their lifetimes. They seem to have lost the evolutionary ability to sneak up on their prey, as they did with varying degrees of success before this pandemic and economic collapse.

Now we can see and hear them coming from miles away in a toxic cloud as they screech out their greed and unsheathe their talons, in gross anticipation of wiping out entire flocks and destroying their homes and food supplies in the process. How long do we let this happen before we regular humans put aside our differences and rise up in solidarity to attack our mutual enemy in order to save ourselves?

As Russian polymath Pyotr Kropotkin argued in Mutual Aid, his 1902 treatise against the pseudo-science of Social Darwinism espoused by the likes of Herbert Spencer, the response of the multiple bird species in my backyard is the rule of all life on earth, rather than the exception. Far from what Thomas Hobbes called a constant war of all against all for bare survival, it is cooperation, not cutthroat competition, which really has enabled species to thrive.

Kropotkin:

In The Descent of Man he (Charles Darwin) gave some powerful pages to illustrate its proper, wide sense. He pointed out how, in numberless animal societies, the struggle between separate individuals for the means of existence disappears, how struggle is replaced by co-operation, and how that substitution results in the development of intellectual and moral faculties which secure to the species the best conditions for survival.

Then came Late Stage Capitalism, or free market neoliberalism, or corporatism, or the class war, or Social Darwinism on steroids and crack.

Kropotkin laid out in Mutual Aid the case that "we" were far more advanced and psychologically healthy in the Middle Ages. Nowadays, the neoliberal dogmas of personal responsibility, personal entrepreneurship and competition have been drummed into most of us right from birth. The medieval guilds, on the other hand, ensured justice for most, if not all, and protection from the feudal lords who ruled for centuries before they, too,  were finally destroyed by capitalism. Even the lowly serfs had their own guilds. So did virtually every trade and profession.

Fast forward to 2020, and Amazon warehouse workers organizing unions and wildcat strikes are fired by Jeff Bezos, who has personally accumulated an additional $24 billion since the Covid-19 pandemic began. Meanwhile,his vast monopoly engages in Orwellian surveillance of its workers in an effort to quash any incipient mutual aid and solidarity.

Fast forward to 2020, and President Trump insanely suggests that we inject ourselves with household disinfectant as a prelude to "re-opening" the country while building more walls to keep invisible enemies out.

Fast forward to 2020, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo blames the jobless for their own plights because they didn't choose careers in "essential fields" - such as Amazon fulfillment and treating Covid-19 patients while denied face masks and forced to dress in plastic garbage bags because of a dearth of pandemic gear.

Fast forward to 2020, and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden joins Trump in senile xenophobic rhetoric against our fellow human beings in China.

Fast forward to 2020, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell advises states to declare bankruptcy in lieu of helping their residents...and make it "legal" to loot public pension funds. 

Fast forward to 2020, and Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, in calling for the plutonomy to be reopened, states "there are more important things than living."

Fast forward to 2020, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi goes Marie Antoinette one better and brags on national TV about all the boutique ice cream she has stashed in her $24,000 freezer - before returning to Washington to give more aid and succor to billionaires in the cynically named Paycheck Protection Act. (And no, Marie Antoinette did not actually say "let them eat cake" before tumbrelling to her own ultimate reward.)

 "There is no alternative" and "there is no such thing as society" - the infamous quips uttered by Maggie Thatcher before her own devolutionary descent into drooling senility -  have become the official twin anthems of the Ruling Class Racketeers. They are being blared out of a bullhorn heard 'round the world.

George Carlin famously said you'd have to be asleep to actually believe in the American Dream.

Fast forward to the nightmare of 2020, and you'd also have to be deaf and blind and drugged and comatose not to be aware of the regressive mutated raptors swooping down upon you.

Kropotkin wrote, a mere 15 years before the French Revolution-inspired Russian Revolution:

More than that; not only many aspirations of our modern radicals were already realized in the middle ages, but much of what is described now as Utopian was accepted then as a matter of fact.; We are laughed at when we say that work must be pleasant, but "everyone must be pleased with his work, a medieval Kuttenberg (Germany) ordinance says, "and no one shall, while doing nothing, appropriate for himself what others have produced by application and work, because laws must be a shield for application and work."

There was actually once a law on the books that decreed happiness and forbade plunder and inequality! So isn't it long past time we all went medieval on Trump, Pelosi, McConnell, Cuomo and the whole perverted, mutated lot of them? We might not permanently defeat them, but like the multiple species of smaller birds in my one little backyard, we do have the innate power to annoy and harass them into beating one of their historical, cyclical retreats.

It's a law of nature. It's how we not only survive, it's how we thrive against all odds and against all predatory political oddities.