The Woke-Washed and the Vote-Washed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Show Must Go On

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Let us at least try to count the ways: 

 

Censorship and Narrative Are Incestuous Bedfellows

*Updated below.

I'll admit it. I am a diehard fan of the New York Post. I have been for most of my adult life. Who couldn't be a fan of a tabloid that once famously screamed "Headless Body Found in Topless Bar?"

To be precise, I don't read the Post as much as I scan it. If its scandals and scare headlines do nothing else, they greatly enhance the effects of my first cup of morning coffee. My daily hit of Post is the necessary prelude to seeing what the New York Times is up to. It's also fun to count the hours or days that it takes for the Times to catch up to the Post's scoops on the latest grisly crime or celebrity death.

As I am writing this blog entry at 9 a.m. on Thursday, more than 24 hours have passed since the Post broke the story of Hunter Biden's laptop (fake? hacked? stolen?). And the Times was still not On It. Not that I really expected them to be. No other major publication, as far as I could tell, was touching it at first either.

But what's unsettling is that unlike its fellow Narrators, the Times wasn't even covering the real story - which is that Twitter and Facebook had unilaterally blocked all links to the Post article and had even blocked the accounts of some of the more prominent users promoting it. In the coup de grace, Twitter blocked the entire account of the New York Post itself.

The real story now is not the chronic Hunter Biden mess. The real story is that a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires have arrogated to themselves the power to control everything we see and hear. That these billionaires also happen to be the incestuous bedfellows of the so-called Deep State/ a/k/a the Permanent Ruling Class, should be even more cause for alarm.

They are flailing and they are scrambling to explain themselves to the American public. They haven't had time to contrive or peddle the usual Kremlin narrative. They have not been able to tie the Delaware computer repairman - who claims he copied Hunter's hard disk after Hunter apparently was so messed up on drugs that he never claimed or even paid for the repairs to his machine - to Vladimir Putin and his election-meddling. discord-sowing, democracy-destroying army of Internet trolls.

And in their rush to censorship, they have given a great gift to Trump. They really are out to get him, and by extension, his supporters.

I'd given the Post article a cursory skim on Wednesday morning. My skepticism was immediately aroused when the name of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani appeared in connection to it. The Post is openly backing Donald Trump's re-election and digging up Biden scandals by the score. Could it nonetheless be true that Hunter Biden is even more of a scammer and influence peddler than we knew, selling access to his father regardless of whether he could actually produce his father in the flesh?  Is it also possible that Joe Biden lied through his teeth when he denied either knowing what Sonny Boy was up to, or that he'd had his own direct part in the grift? Of course it is. But when weighing whether a piece of journalism is trustworthy or not, you must always look at the sourcing and the context. And that especially goes for the Paper of Record (the Times) and its pro-war propaganda quoting unnamed officials.

Long story short: I took the whole thing with a pebble sized grain of salt. I figured that diehard Trump supporters would promote the story, and that diehard non-Trump supporters would scoff at it, or just ignore it. I never figured that the reading public would be denied the chance to even see it in order to draw their own conclusions. I, personally, didn't find the piece compelling enough to either think about or blog about on Wednesday. 

But here I am on Thursday, blogging about it. And wondering whether this censorship had the Democratic Party's hand on it, or whether Joe Biden himself raised enough of a stink about it to get his Facebook/Twitter CEO/ Deep State donors to help stop its spread. Despite polls that show Biden winning in a landslide, you have to wonder what they might have to hide and fear.

You also have to wonder what the Times has to fear by deliberately not informing its readers about the censorship and the slap in the face to the First Amendment. Then again, they are barely covering Julian Assange's extradition hearing and the dangers to press freedom that the Wikileaks prosecution presents.

The Post debacle is a lot harder to suppress, of course.They call the boomeranging, mushrooming effect that its Biden story has elicited the Streisand Effect, after the phenomenon of Barbra Streisand once drawing outsize attention to the location of her luxury estate through her strident complaints about the tabloid press publicizing the location of her luxury estate.

Tonight's dueling presidential Town Halls are another example of the Censorship Industrial Complex hard at work.  When the privately-run Commission on Presidential Debates decided to cancel the second official debate because a Covid-stricken Trump balked at the event being aired remotely, ABC-Disney agreed to host a solo Town Hall for Biden. A since-recovered (or so we're told) Trump then made a sweet deal with his alma mater, NBC, to headline a similar event for him, at the exact same time and on the exact same date. 

This ratings-driven "Battle of the Presidential Network Stars" is, of course, just the latest blatant example of broadcasting against the public interest. MSNBC star Rachel Maddow, who has become fabulously wealthy off the Trump-Hate/Russiagate Narrative franchise (#Resistance, Inc) is helping her network's ratings immensely by pretend-biting the very hand that feeds her. She is even leading the pack of censorious liberals who are urging people to protest! But what this really means is  that millions more will Tune In to watch even more of Maddow's censorious commentary as she leads the post-game NBC panel manufacturing the outrage.

Maybe some enterprising YouTuber can contrive a split screen image of Biden and Trump talking over one another at their dueling town halls. It would essentially be a repeat of their first Wrestlemania debate.

There is simultaneously not enough choice and too much choice.

 With Halloween approaching, there are literally hundreds of other, better horror movies streaming endlessly out of our smart screens to keep us occupied.

And if that doesn't appeal, don't forget that there is always the horror of our uncensored, day-to-day lives to fall back on, to keep us at least tenuously riveted to reality.

*Update: The New York Times has finally weighed in, via an article time-stamped 11.43 a.m., on the censorship. The Gray Lady can't ignore the uncomfortable fact that Twitter had also suspended the account of the Trump campaign for promoting the Post's Biden story. The Times piece uncritically reports that the campaign's promotion of the Post article violated the social media giant's rule against promoting stolen material.  The Paper of Record thus tacitly gives its own stamp of approval to Twitter's claim that, because Hunter Biden's emails were private and allegedly "hacked," evidence of any wrongdoing by the Bidens contained therein should be and will be suppressed. This specious rationale for censorship is identical to claims that the Wikileaks revelations about Hillary Clinton's chicanery are suspect on their face -  not because they are not true, but because of the means by which they were obtained. The story that the Clinton emails were hacked by "the Russians" has been repeated so often that it is an article of faith, although it has never been proven.

 It's another sad day for journalism.

Guns, Fetuses, and For-Profit Health Insurance

 What could be more important during this dangerous pandemic and its ensuing mass human misery and despair than the topics in the title of this post?

 

Thus far in the Senate's Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Amy Coney Barrett, this trifecta of partisan wedge issues has reigned supreme. With the showboating and grilling not even reaching the midpoint as of this writing, I suppose we can still hold out hope that one lone legislator comes out and asks Barrett for her initial visceral reaction to meeting Donald Trump in the flesh for the first time. Given that she has coyly refused to commit to recusing herself on his likely legal challenge to Joe Bidens predicted landslide victory, I doubt she'll be giving even the slightest hint of any human reaction. Not even in the unlikely event that a senile Judiciary Committee member veers off script and blurts it right out. As of Tuesday, Dianne Feinstein, 87, was living back in the 1950s, haunted by anecdotal memories of her peers' back-alley abortions. She is afraid that era will come back in the event of a Barrett confirmation, because Roe v Wade is not yet, according to Barrett, a "super precedent" exempt from overturning. Of course, the nominee will not say whether or not she'd vote to overturn it because she reassuringly won't be "queen of the world" with the power to overturn anything until and unless a challenge "winds its way" up to the highest court.

With corporate lawyers and oligarchs controlling all three branches of the US government, I just cannot not get the image of side-winding slithery snakes in suits out of my head.

 I was actually waiting for one of the inquisitors to press Barrett on the unseemliness of holding the first day of this rushed hearing on Columbus Day, a national holiday whose symbolism is integral to the culture wars which artificially separate the Republicans from the Democrats. To hear Trump's GOP tell it, any defacing or tear-downs of statues of the invaders, slave-owners and ethnic cleansers of yore is not to be tolerated. So why were they conducting government business on such a sacred day when all good patriots should be marching to honor Columbus and battling all those Woke Antifa hordes in our midst? Since Columbus was bankrolled by good Catholics and Inquisitors Ferdinand and Isabella,  somebody at least could have asked her if the Columbus Day session had offended her religious sensibilities.

Instead, the Republicans on the panel can't shut up about the Democrats attacking her Catholicism (which they aren't) and the Democrats telling one maudlin story after the other about the lucky people whose lives and bank accounts were saved by the Affordable Care Act. These heartbreaking stories are designed to instill guilt into a woman who has already experienced a whole lifetime of absorbing Catholic guilt, and who uses the so-called Ginsburg rule of never disclosing to the public what she thinks about any issue with which she might be confronted as a Supreme. This convenient unwritten rule gives her and other judicial nominees an easy out that mere mortals can never get away with in a job interview. If past writings and deeds are revealed, the nominees can easily dismiss them as the writings and deeds of a private citizen. We are supposed to believe that once judges don their magical black robes, they magically strip themselves of prejudices, not to mention their very fallible humanity.

Is anybody buying this nonsense?

Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois broke ranks for a bit when he challenged Barrett on a recent dissenting opinion in which she argued that a convicted felon's right to own a gun is a Second Amendment right, whereas the stripping of the voting rights of convicted felons is a matter for individual states to decide. Just as she was holding forth like a twisted pretzel on the rights of states to bar ex-cons from voting, but claiming that a mere fraudster should be entitled to bear arms, C-Span broke away from this important and interesting exchange to cover the pro-forma convening of the (empty) lower House.

The House was not actually meeting to discuss anything so mundane as Covid relief, or how to combat Donald Trump's ominous plans to "monitor" polling places on Election Day. But C-Span had to do its own patriotic duty of filming the solemn pounding of the gavel. And then everybody went to lunch. And then I took the opportunity to write this quick blog post before getting back to the depressing Senate spectacle.

Eric Levitz has an interesting piece at New York magazine which discusses the "Constitutional originalism" embraced by Barrett and her hard-right mentor, the late Justice Antonin Scalia. This legal principle is nothing but a smokescreen for conservative hypocrisy. It's impossible, Levitz writes, to fall back on a "strict" reading of the Constitution because its wording was always made deliberately vague.

When justices claim the authority to determine the unequivocal meaning of a phrase at a given point in history, they are not demonstrating judicial humility but supreme arrogance. The farcical nature of the originalist enterprise was made plain in the 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller. Then, Justices Antonin Scalia and John Paul Stevens each produced their own historical monograph on the Second Amendment’s contemporary meaning, which arrived at antithetical conclusions that just so happened to line up perfectly with each jurist’s ideological tendency. The opinions nevertheless had one thing in common: Both were poorly regarded by actual historians.

Barrett did give one clue during Tuesday morning's session on how she squares her professional legal life with her religious life. After arriving at a decision that might be hurtful to a human being, she testified, she then asks herself how she would feel if, for example, it was her own child bearing the brunt of it. If she concludes that her decision was still a fair one no matter how injurious to this hypothetical child of hers, then her conscience is entirely clear. She has proven to her own satisfaction that she was in the right. She not only examines her conscience, she cross-examines her conscience. And she never has to look back. Second-guessing herself is apparently not part of her repertoire.

This courage of her own convictions is so absolutely and rigidly righteous, it should scare people.

And both the Democrats and the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee were glowing in their effusive praise of how well-behaved and how quiet  six of her children were, sitting behind her in the audience. (The seventh, a boy with Down Syndrome, was left at home, but was very excited to see Mom on television, she said.)

Somebody should ask her how she feels about Trump's penchant for making fun of disabled people.

There are plenty more smart,  qualified and well-credentialed people just like Amy Coney Barrett waiting in the right wings, ready and willing and able to challenge Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or another conservative neoliberal Democrat in 2024.

If you think, correctly, that Trump is a menace, then just try to imagine a Trump with a high IQ who knows when to keep his or her mouth shut while sowing conscience-free chaos.

Off With Their Heads

 What is the country for, but to support its prince in his enterprise?

-- Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

While the American punditocracy is busy deciding which insipid courtier won the vice presidential debate  - was the "pivotal moment" the fly resting on Mike Pence's stiff white coif, or was it Kamala Harris bragging about all the generals and reactionary Republicans who are backing Joe Biden? - the rest of the country is wondering when the hell they'll be getting more Covid-19 relief.

As aristocratic scolds like Michelle Obama love to remind us all day and every day, our job as citizens is not to make strident demands for guaranteed health care, housing and food. It is to Vote for a more "soothing" Joe Biden as if our lives depended on it, even more than we depend on food, health and shelter. Because choosing a third party candidate, such as a Green, who supports universal health coverage and a pro-environment, antiwar agenda would just be, Mrs. Obama chided this week, simply "throwing away your vote."

That statement pretty much tells you what the country is really for. And it ain't for you. What is an election for, after all, but for the lesser people to give the quadrennial stamp of legitimacy to a cabal of princes and wolves?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also made it absolutely and chillingly plain this week that her priority is not restoring the nation's actual people to health, but to restore her exiled Democratic Party to power. Sending those $1200 relief checks to people struggling to pay their bills would only make Donald the Usurper look good, the same way that Henry VIII tried to make himself look good 500 years ago by handing out baskets of leftover food to the poor at Christmastime.

That was a monarchy and this is a democracy, by golly, so Madam Speaker is not about to stoop to Noblesse Oblige - not when she views the deliberate withholding of direct cash aid to hundreds of millions of people as just the right hook to get them out there to vote. And they say King Donald is the demented one, the way he cut off the desultory-at-best negotiations on pandemic relief between her and Treasury Chancellor Steve Mnuchin in a fit of steroid-enhanced pique.

But since wealthy people still have to get around their playground of an exploited planet, Pelosi and Mnuchin were reported to be feverishly working on a stand-alone bailout of the polluting airline industry. Airline stocks soared anew as these two courtier/oligarchs renewed their negotiations. This was despite the fact that Pelosi had previously denounced negotiating Covid relief in such separate, limited packages, because "they (the party currently in power) don’t want to put food on the table and rent in the pockets of the American people, crush the virus, support our heroes, and the rest.”

Because here's the thing. Stand-alone stimulus checks sent out to needy Americans would bear Donald Trump's name on them, and could conceivably garner him extra votes. It's much better, Pelosi insinuated, to draw out the mass hardship for several more weeks or months to achieve the noble goal of Joe Biden winning the election.  If Nancy Pelosi can make enough people too hungry, homeless, terrified, desperate or disgusted to follow Michelle Obama's hectoring advice to get out there and vote, then at least they won't be voting for Donald Trump.

(Update: As I was writing this article, Pelosi had flip-flopped - once again - to calling for a broader stimulus package, including checks. I believe that this topsy-turvy negotiation process is mainly theater, to keep us properly gaslit as we wait in suspense for the barest kind of relief, and then both sides can declare victory.)

 When you hear them warn that "everything is at stake" in this election, maybe they can make you forget about the big juicy steak you can't afford.

What Pelosi and the Democrats are essentially saying is that American children going to bed hungry or families getting evicted for just a little teensy while longer is certainly better than having Trump in the White House for another four whole horrible years. Let them eat Biden, who promised his Wall Street donors that under his rule, "nothing would fundamentally change." 

This is being sold as a choice that we can all believe in.

 As the Red Queen lectured Alice in Through the Looking Glass: "You may call it nonsense if you like, but I've heard nonsense, compared to which that would be as sensible as a dictionary."

Vote for the Lesser Greater Nonsense!

Because the United States, ranking first or near-first in the world in Covid cases, despite having the most expensive health care system in the world, is not the "slow country" which the Red Queen scoffed at, nor is it even (not quite yet anyway) among the "shithole countries" that King Donald sneered it.

"Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place," she lectured to the panting, befuddled Alice."If you want to get somewhere else, you have to run twice as fast." 

 

And political courtiers talking fast and folksily (yet wolfishly) out of both sides of their mouths is also an absolute must if the princely enterprise that is America can continue to thrive, and so that the political courtiers can fulfill the great American meritocratic dream of one day becoming full-fledged princes and media moguls themselves.

Covid and Capitalism On Steroids

 Leave it to Donald Trump to equate his truncated hospital stay with a post-doc residency in infectious diseases. His malignant narcissism, turbocharged with a euphoric regimen of the powerful steroid Dexamethasone, led him to boast he'd learned so much about Covid that he discharged himself from the hospital after only four days. Armed with that false sense of well-being supplied by the drug, he is using his disease as germ warfare, infecting all who come into his path with his toxic spittle and "don't worry be happy" cant. And that includes his own teenage son, assuming that he is not already sick.

Trump was in full S.O.B. (shortness of breath) mode as he went huffing and puffing up to the White House balcony on Monday night for his Mussolini photo op and campaign ad.

 

 He is getting back to work even if it kills him and everybody around him, not to mention the legions of his mask-averse fans who worship him like a god. And not to mention the untold numbers of people who will continue to sicken and die of disease and despair, thanks to his continuing reign of ignorance and terror. 

The White House has been literally transformed into a pest-house.

The heavy-duty steroid that he's on is commonly reserved for those with severe symptoms of Covid-19. I suspect that his compliant physicians dosed him with it not so much for therapeutic purposes, but because it does such a good job of masking symptoms. I have witnessed just what this drug can do when my husband, suffering in the last stages of Multiple Myeloma, was prescribed it.  With only weeks left to live,  this normally responsible and sane man felt so good he decided it would be a great idea to use our house as collateral to purchase a BMW, which he would then race professionally on the world circuit. To say that this drug instills a false and even psychotic sense of well-being is a vast understatement. 

Trump was already psychologically damaged. And he has the nuclear codes. And nobody seems capable of saying No to him. Forget about him not being out of the woods for another week to ten days. The whole world is in more danger than ever with this steroid-addled, ratings-addicted tyrant on the loose.

One commentator compared his balcony scene to Michael Jackson dangling his infant son out of a hotel window. I had also been thinking of Michael Jackson, but more in relation to his likewise being so rich and powerful that he was able to hire a compliant doctor to administer anesthesia to help him sleep. That turned out to be the ultimate in insomnia cures.

Trump, who has reportedly never slept much thanks to imbibing a dozen Diet Cokes a day, just got his own compliant doctors to feed his permanent sub-manic state with a psychosis-inducing stimulant.

Meanwhile, as The Washington Post reported this week, more than $2.3 trillion allocated through the grotesquely named CARES Act was injected into the big bloated coffers of corporations and individual oligarchs that were never required to prove either immediate need or future adverse impact from the pandemic. Nor were they required to promise they would keep their workers on their payrolls.

Contrast this with the bargain Band-Aid and the crumbling tablet of expiring aspirin of the cruelly temporary unemployment supplements and one-time-only $1200 "stimulus" checks tossed out by a bipartisan Congress to the tens of millions of people who are suffering the most.

 It was a massive dose of financial steroids for the rich and the ethically unhealthy, allowing the pandemic itself to rage on and on, and get even worse. 

The Trump presidency is emblematic of our entire terminally diseased capitalistic system, which needs euthanasia much more than it requires any more of the wasted therapy that ends up hurting the whole world.

Don't just take my word for it. Pope Francis has issued a perfectly-timed encyclical, inspired by his namesake saint of Assisi, with the anti-capitalist and anti-war theme of Fraternity and Social Friendship. This paragraph takes direct aim at Trumpism:

The best way to dominate and gain control over people is to spread despair and discouragement, even under the guise of defending certain values. Today, in many countries, hyperbole, extremism and polarization have become political tools. Employing a strategy of ridicule, suspicion and relentless criticism, in a variety of ways one denies the right of others to exist or to have an opinion. Their share of the truth and their values are rejected and, as a result, the life of society is impoverished and subjected to the hubris of the powerful. Political life no longer has to do with healthy debates about long-term plans to improve people’s lives and to advance the common good, but only with slick marketing techniques primarily aimed at discrediting others. In this craven exchange of charges and counter-charges, debate degenerates into a permanent state of disagreement and confrontation.

But the Pope doesn't let the neoliberal system of government and the discourse-controlling corporate media which produced Trump off the hook either:

 The marketplace, by itself, cannot resolve every problem, however much we are asked to believe this dogma of neoliberal faith. Whatever the challenge, this impoverished and repetitive school of thought always offers the same recipes. Neoliberalism simply reproduces itself by resorting to the magic theories of "spillover" or "trickle"-- without using the name-- as the only solution to societal problems. There is little appreciation of the fact that the alleged "spillover" does not resolve the inequality that gives rise to new forms of violence threatening the fabric of society. It is imperative to have a proactive economic policy directed at "promoting an economy that favours productive diversity and business creativity" and makes it possible for jobs to be created and not cut. Financial speculation fundamentally aimed at quick profit continues to wreak havoc. Indeed, "without internal forms of solidarity and mutual trust, the market cannot completely fulfil its proper economic function. And today this trust has ceased to exist." The story did not end the way it was meant to, and the dogmatic formulae of prevailing economic theory proved not to be infallible. The fragility of world systems in the face of the pandemic has demonstrated that not everything can be resolved by market freedom. It has also shown that, in addition to recovering a sound political life that is not subject to the dictates of finance, "we must put human dignity back at the centre and on that pillar build the alternative social structures we need."

Sick Etiquette, Or Speaking Ill of the Ill

Some of the same people who just the other day were accusing Donald Trump of personally killing tens of thousands of people with Covid-19 today are falling all over themselves to wish this mass murderer and the worst criminal in the history of humanity a speedy recovery from his own bout with the virus.

The less hypocritical among them are, at least, lopping off the requisite "Prayers" from their get-well tweets, sending only their ambiguous generic Thoughts. That way, they can leave the interpretation of their mental processes to the imagination of the audience. They can have their politically correct cake and eat it too.

Twitter, meanwhile, has banned all tweets that hope for the death of Trump. One must not speak ill of the ill, at least not until he or she is safely buried. This especially goes for those rude Lefties. The elite centrist #Resistance fighters of the plutocracy have proven once again that they hate the Left more than they hate Trump, when they sanctimoniously chide us not to wish ill upon the criminal ill, with whom they are absolutely complicit.

The quality of Trump's continuing existence remains a mystery. Given the way he's always pumped up his health, virility and stamina, the White House's official statement that he has a slight fever and cough can probably be interpreted as "pneumonia and on a ventilator."

I imagine that if Trump is not on a ventilator or at death's door, then he is being a very difficult patient indeed. According to the divorce testimony of ex-wife Ivana, he was in so much pain after his scalp reduction surgery that he raped her in a fit of rage. He also reportedly called his cosmetic surgeon and threatened to kill him - but only after not paying his bill, suing him, and destroying his practice.

So I hope that Walter Reed and its medical staff are all current on their malpractice insurance premiums. Just that one experimental "monoclonal antibody cocktail"  that Trump is reportedly chugging or having injected into his veins has Lawsuit written all over it.

Assuming that Trump does die, despite all the experimental drugs and all the Thoughts and Prayers being spewed his way by his oligarchic peers, we will also be sternly advised not to gloat or celebrate.

Moms Mabley once quipped, "They say you shouldn't say nothing about the dead unless it's good. He's dead. Good!" But you know what? She then proceeded to eventually die herself. Let that be a lesson to all you Lefties getting distastefully happy because the Most Dangerous Threat to Democracy in Our Lifetime may be hovering close to death.

 There is a decent interval which must be observed before the trashing of dead master criminals can begin afresh. They say it's out of respect for the surviving crime family members. But it's also a superstition thing, a cultural taboo dating back to pre-Enlightenment times.  You just never know how long the ghost will linger around the neighborhood before realizing that it is well and truly dead and finally goes gently into the Great Beyond. And in the pettlly vengeful Trump's case, that waiting-around lingering period might be longer than normal, given how he allegedly will refuse to leave the White House even if he loses the election. Plus, it's getting uncomfortably close to Halloween.

I imagine that just as they did when he dropped his very first big bombs, unleashing "fire and fury like the world as never seen" then more than one pundit will gush on the day of his funeral (after he was finally taken off life support for his low grade fever): "Trump has at last shown the world that he is presidential."

George Bush will share another piece of candy with Michelle Obama. Chelsea Clinton and Ivanka Trump will kiss and make up and become best friends again. President Kamala Harris, who took over when Uncle Joe became shockingly incapacitated when he "caught cold" the day after his election, will prove her presidential solidarity by dropping a few more bombs and imposing new economic sanctions on another poor country with socialistic tendencies.

Am I getting too inappropriately ahead of myself?

Even if Trump does make a complete recovery thanks to the magic of magical thinking, prayer, designer drugs and concierge medical care, I don't believe that either he or his party will be one bit chastened. If anything, he will tout his return to health as proof that the virus is no worse than the common cold. He will market himself as the bullish hero for the cause of White Male Herd Immunity and Survival of the Fittest. 

When the elites hypocritically wish for a speedy Trump recovery, what they're really wishing for is the protection of their own Status Quo.  When their New York Times editorial board pleads "Get Well, Mr. President," it is for reasons of their own financial and hegemonic security. Apparently, a dysfunctional bedridden Trump will unleash even more "chaos" on the world than the functional Trump has unleashed thus far!

In times of crisis, the public looks to the president for reassurance and guidance. What happens when he is at the heart of that crisis? Public confidence plummets, and tensions rise. Global markets are shaken. Foreign adversaries search for ways to exploit the uncertainty.

Translation: #Russiagate, or the foisting of blame on any manufactured adversary for the social unrest caused by the massive economic inequality engendered by the American ruling class itself, will die over their dead bodies. To keep their dream alive, they must keep their Trump Frankenstein monster alive until they can replace him with a more attractive model more willing to do their bidding with a smile and a smirk and a bushel full of platitudes.

Debate & Switch, Crash & Burn

Lots of people feared that the first presidential "debate" between our two designated right-wing codgers would end up being a train wreck. But nobody could ever have expected a reenactment of the Hindenburg disaster. That Nazi airship blew up in 1937 New Jersey, whereas the more modern fascist version exploded in Ohio on Tuesday night.

If you were still naively operating under the assumption that we have even the merest vestige of a functioning democracy left, than Tuesday night's spectacle starring human dirigible Donald Trump (with a largely muted walk-on assist from Joe Biden) should have permanently disabused you of that quaint notion.

The commentary running through many an aghast head as the grisly event streamed into millions of foreclosure-prone American homes went something like this:  (h/t Herb Morrison)

"Oh, the humanity, and all the passengers screaming around here. I... I can't talk, ladies and gentlemen. Honest, it's completely a mess of smoking wreckage. And everybody can't hardly breathe. It's hard, it's crazy. Honestly, I can hardly breathe. I'm going to step inside where I cannot see it.... This is the worst thing I've ever witnessed!"

The gasbag blimp known as Donald Trump has been blowing things up for quite awhile now, both verbally and operationally. And since his wreckage will be raining down upon the earth far into the future. the phrase "Oh, the humanity" can't even begin to describe what we witnessed on Tuesday night. For as much as we thought that we were steeled by the last three and a half years of Trumpism, could anything have prepared us for an American president publicly calling on the crypto-fascist Proud Boys militia to "stand back and stand by?" He also urged his ad hoc troops to converge on the nation's polling places on Election Day to monitor balloting and, presumably, to accost voters who look or act suspiciously un-American. Presumably, these volunteer monitor-militias will also be fully armed. Presumably, the very thought of armed freelance election monitors will also keep enough people away from the polls to even affect the outcome.

It's no wonder that Trump wants all the schools to reopen in the middle of a pandemic. Without schools, young people cannot be properly indoctrinated by his proposed Patriotism re-education curriculum. Without the monitoring custodial function which classrooms provide, students might even start to wake up and realize that their leaders in both parties are making a real botch of things.

If they watched the Tuesday night debate debacle, however, they are probably already realizing it.

If anything can finally terrify Undecideds or Stay-At-Homes into voting for the detritus known as Joe Biden, it was Tuesday night's dirigible disaster. Maybe we can pick through the wreckage and salvage something. Although, with such "gaffes" as Biden's indignant insistence  that he has "nothing against" Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett because she seems like "a very fine person" Biden does sort of evoke Trump's own infamous remark that "there are very fine people on both sides" of the racist/anti-racist divide.

Biden's disavowal of the Green New Deal, and his admission that his "public option" in health care coverage would just be a means-tested renaming of Medicaid, that he is more prone to starting a war with Russia than "Putin's puppy" is, that he repeated discredited CIA propaganda about Russia putting a bounty on the American invaders and occupiers of Afghanistan, and that he said all of these "reassuring" things with his beady eyes squinting straight through the camera at the terrified viewers at home, might still make some of those annoying  "purists"  out there continue to refuse to find their sustenance in a toxic landfill.

Here's what Biden said about the bait and switch of a "public option":

 "It’s only for those people who are so poor they qualify for Medicaid they can get that free in most States, except Governors who want to deny people who are poor Medicaid. Anyone who qualifies for Medicaid would automatically be enrolled in the public option. The vast majority of the American people would still not be in that option." (my bold.)

Translation: the option is not only restrictive, it is every bit as mandatory as a law requiring people living high on the hog of the minimum wage or reduced unemployment benefits to buy a Bronze plan which they can never afford to use because of obscenely high deductibles and co-pays.

Since cutting off Trump's microphone as he lit his own poisoned gas on fire apparently was not part of the plan by the ratings and profit-hungry corporate media outlets which created Trump in the first place, they will forge right ahead in their unending game of disaster-feasting:

"And, I - I've... lost my breath several times during this exciting moment here. Will you pardon me just a moment? I'm not going to stop talking.... I'm just going to swallow several times until I can keep on."

 

 

Amy Coney Barrett's Communistic Tendencies

Someone should alert Donald Trump that the ethos of People of Praise, the Christian group which counts his newest Supreme Court nominee as a member, bears an uncanny resemblance to the core principles of communism. Maybe then he'd think twice about constantly and ridiculously hurling the Socialist/Marxist epithet at the corporate Democrats in an effort to deflect attention from their mutual capitalistic agenda. Who knows? He could even end up withdrawing  Coney Barrett's name from nomination. People of Praise does not, for example, embrace the odious Prosperity Gospel beloved of GOP cultists, who count greed not only as a Christian virtue but as an addendum to the original Ten Commandments.

Somebody should also alert the media conglomerate about this oversight so they may start calling Trump out on it. In an alternate universe, it might even reach the point that the capitalist class accused Trump and his nominee of both heresy and hypocrisy for ignoring the fact that Coney Barrett's group solidly adheres to the original socialistic radicalism of Jesus even as she herself professes public fealty to the Pantheon of Constitutional Originalists. This dual belief system simply does not compute.

Of course, I jest. Because the Narrative chosen by the liberal press is that People of Praise is a scary, "secretive" cult that directly inspired Margaret Atwood's dystopian The Handmaid's Tale novel about forced fecundity in a misogynistic theocratic American society. That neither of these things is true doesn't seem to matter.

According to The Guardian:

Interviews with experts who have studied charismatic Christian groups such as People of Praise, and with former members of the group, plus a review of the group’s own literature, reveal an organization that appears to dominate some members’ everyday lives, in which so-called “heads” – or spiritual advisers – make big life decisions, and in which members are expected to financially support one another. Married women – such as Barrett – count their husbands as their “heads” and all members are expected to donate 5% of their income to the organization.

 The group emerged out of the Catholic charismatic movement of the late 1960s, which blended Catholicism and Protestant Pentecostalism – Catholics and Protestants are both members – and adopted practices like speaking in tongues. The group’s literature shows communal living is also encouraged, at least among unmarried members, as is the sharing of finances between households.

The People of Praise website states that "We admire the first Christians who were led by the Holy Spirit to form a community. Those early believers put their lives and their possessions in common, and there were no needy persons among them."

Now, compare that redistributionist radicalism to the old-school secular communism that once thrived right here in the Land of the Free.

 In Vivian Gornick's The Romance of American Communism, one former leader  explains how the party was organized in his poor Depression-era New York City neighborhood:

 As for the individual Communist at the branch level, four-fifths of the time he  followed Party directives, one-fifth of the time he was on his own; on his own he was supposed to respond to whatever happened in the course of a day in the neighborhood... "if there was a tenant conviction, or a sick comrade,  or if he was needed to join a picket line, or canvas during an election. Or if the neighborhood needed a traffic light, or a shopkeeper was having trouble with the Fire Department. You know, just like the neighborhood Democratic Party would have operated - only we always got there first."

The branch members' other duties consisted of contributing a week's wages to the Party once a year, selling the Daily Worker and running off weekly leaflets.

People of Praise is religious, Communism is traditionally secular. Both embrace the spirit of community and both also have operated under varying degrees of rigidity and control, as do most organizations.

Amy Coney Barrett said that she admires the life and legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I hope that at her confirmation hearing she is also asked about the life and legacy of fellow Catholic lay-person and anarchist Dorothy Day, who herself had undergone an abortion before converting to the Catholic faith and spending her life in social activism and constantly "pricking the consciences" of the Establishment regarding war, inequality, and labor rights.  I hope, that in light of the fact that Coney Barrett has previously vowed for religious reasons to recuse herself in capital punishment cases, that she will also have enough of a conscience to recuse herself in Supreme Court cases concerning contraception and Roe v Wade. 

But her history of siding with corporations and oligarchs over the needs of ordinary people is troubling, to say the least. She's like Mitt Romney, a devout Mormon, in that regard. He also tithes and generously helps members of his own insular community in tandem with getting rich, through private equity, by indebting businesses before destroying them and insisting that godless "corporations are people, my friend."

It is the fine art of holding two opposing ethical positions in one's mind at the same time, and thus being able to sleep well at night. Trump will also easily cancel out every kind of conservative hypocrisy whenever it suits him, just so long as it serves the purpose of shielding his own.

But it doesn't hurt to try to rattle their rigid, complacent, carefully compartmentalized little brains every once in a while, does it?

And we must always have faith. If you do happen to pray, then you might beseech the almighty to allow Amy Coney Barrett to follow in the footsteps of Reagan appointee Sandra Day O'Connor, who at a relatively young age resigned from the nation's highest court in order to care for her sick husband. It was the ethical thing to do.

Of course, since she was succeeded by the arch-conservative Samuel Alito in the Bush Jr. administration, we should also always be very careful about what we pray and wish for.

Pick Your Fascism

Since the pandemic is transforming the traditional Election Day into Election Season with early mail-in balloting, the Establishment's' Get Out the Vote campaign is more strident than ever.

These last few weeks of Decision 2020 feel like being swept along in a turgid stream of elite consciousness. As hard as we try to swim against the tide of the Most Consequential Election in the history of humanity, the more they try to drown us with their voter-shaming - when they're not mentally electrocuting us with their jolts of nuclear-powered gaslight.

I didn't know whether to gulp for air or melt down into an abject puddle when the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (Harry and Meghan) deigned to inform me, from the rustic grounds of their $14 million California estate, that I am allowed to "make my voice heard." 

I must use my voice to check a box to prove that I matter, Meghan nattered.

Voting will prove that I hate hatred enough to elect one of their own in order maintain "our values." And here I was, too lazy and ignorant to even realize that the magical festival of Quadrannius has finally arrived! It is that special time that comes only once every four years, when the oligarchs and celebrities go all noblesse oblige  to wake up the citizens from the cynicism and the apathy that their bitter pills have created. If we do not give them the degree of legitimacy with which to feed us even more of their bitter pills for the next four years, then they'll end up looking like the quacks they are instead of the healers they want to resemble.

To press the point home, Harry was not above playing  the guilt-tripping, gaslighting card. Give 'em hell, Harry! He reminded us with his Voice that we regular people are even more important and privileged than he is. Because as a royal personage, he has been dreadfully disenfranchised for his whole adult life!

Bertram Gross  warned 40 years ago of the "Friendly Fascism" that was taking over this country and the rest of the advanced free world. Although the parts of the book dealing with the then-bugaboos of Soviet communism and "stagflation" are dated, he was remarkably prescient about the slow, boiling-frog-death of representative democracy via an insidious corporate/oligarchic coup.

The "F" word has finally come out of the elite closet with the victory of Donald Trump. But that is only because he is an "unfriendly" fascist who rules with a sneer and a scowl instead of with the simper and the smile which has been fooling some of the people most of the time, or at least most of the people some of the time, as the frog-water simmered. Whenever the bath threatened to boil over and wake up the comatose frogs, friendly-looking presidents like Barack Obama added the requisite dose of cool charm to augment the glow of the gaslight.

Donald Trump, of course, is only adding salt to the water and gasoline to the fire. He is riling people up when they should be narcotized. He is not using what Gross called Triplespeak: the political propaganda technique comprised of "myth, jargon and confidential straight talk."

Gross wrote:

"Unlike Orwell's doublethink and newspeak, triplespeak is not part of any overall plan. It merely develops as a logical outcome of the Establishment;s maturation, an essential element of the tightening of oligarchic control."

Without myths like American exceptionalism, democracy  and the founding pioneer spirit, rulers cannot maintain order and support at the lower and middle levels of the Establishment. Jargon is required to justify the power and secrecy and violence of the military/surveillance state. Straight talk is the ploy used by elites to explain why secrecy is needed in the first place, or blather about the brutal hard truth of why social programs must be cut.

Trump, the damaged epitome of immaturity, rails against the surveillance state when it is used by his fellow elites against him. He calls vaunted military heroes "chumps and losers," while the more proper pols glorify their deaths as "the ultimate sacrifice." He directly foments violence, dispensing with all the obfuscatory jargon about human rights and morality which masks the friendly fascism his peers have striven so mightily to perfect.

And therefore, establishment media outlets are manically selling Wokeness in a valiant effort to arouse us just long enough to care about electing Joe Biden - before they put us (along with the street protests they are so eagerly covering) to sleep again, once the danger to their legitimacy passes.

Why else would celebrities and political elites be co-opting the police murder of Breonna Taylor, who lingered in obscurity until the televised murder of George Floyd made her the newest symbol of the moment? Why would the liberal establishment be able to so blithely ignore Obama's drone murders and mass deportations and police crackdowns on the Occupy movement, but now decry Trump's xenophobia and flouting of the Constitution?

It's all about the language, of course. Trump does not, as Gross's friendlier fascists do, "take over the symbols of opposition groups" and make them his own.  As the opposite of Trump's nihilistic shtick, Bertram Gross shares the secret ingredients of the friendly fascist recipe:

"Peace, equality, black power, women's rights, the Constitution, for example,are prominent in the sloganry justifying increased armament, oligarchic wealth, institutionalized white and male supremacy, and the subversion of constitutional rights."

The reason that I hope Joe Biden wins (although, with the luxury of living in a non-battleground state, I don't plan to vote for either him or Trump), is that he is often so miserably inept himself at putting a friendly face on the fascism that long preceded Trump. His campaign has had to walk back his constant stream of "gaffes" almost as often as Trump's handlers have to do damage control on his. Biden wouldn't ever be able to fool enough the people enough of the time, no matter how hard Bernie Sanders and MSNBC try to prop him, and more importantly, the Democratic Party, up.

Biden's immediate reaction, for example, to the no-bill grand jury exoneration of the Louisville SWAT team that gunned down Breonna Taylor was to warn protesters against destroying property.

And as the media very well knows, Trump can never be goaded into saying he'd accept a peaceful transition to power if he loses. Such an admission runs counter to every narcissistic fiber of his damaged being.  We'll probably be hearing Republican disclaimers of his face-saving threats from now until January and beyond, should he lose to Biden.

The first canned battle of these two snarling, smirking geriatric right-wingers will, at least, be an entertaining ratings bonanza of epic WWF proportions.

May our voices of derision finally be heard by the voter-shaming concern trolls. May our feet plod to the polls (or the mailbox) before they race right back to the streets, no matter which of these reactionary characters mounts to an ever more discredited platform of power.

Culture War Witchery Strikes Again

So much for Bernie Sanders's prediction that a President Joe Biden would, after a 50-year conservative political career, become a raging progressive in the vein of FDR if we only give him the chance.

With the specter of a far-right Supreme Court tribunal controlling the country for at least another generation, Biden just nixed the antidote of Democrats packing the court.and ending the Senate filibuster, should he win the presidency. Even though the Republican majority has locked in the votes to confirm Donald Trump's nominee to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Biden was still appealing to them to examine their consciences and delay the vote until after the November election.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett, widely believed to be a shoo-in for the nomination, is, like Biden a devout conservative Roman Catholic, and the jurist that Democrats believe will usher in the final death-blow to Roe v Wade.

Biden could very well be delighted with this nomination, given that he already had to bow to liberal pressure and in 2019 disown his longstanding support for the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for abortion. He has always opposed late-term abortions, voted against aid to organizations which promote legalizing abortion overseas, and, as vice president, he unsuccessfully fought for increased religious exemptions to birth control coverage in the Affordable Care Act.

So, in keeping with his outreach to conservative Republican voters and his dismissal of such progressive policies as Medicare For All and a Green New Deal,will Biden now openly pander to the "right to life" advocates whom he so sorely disappointed when he disowned the Hyde Amendment last year? His ongoing silence on the issue speaks volumes.

Meanwhile, the increasing liberal angst surrounding a newly revived and very serendipitous (for the duopolistic oligarchy, that is) wedge issue of abortion is all of a piece with the much more contrived angst over Donald Trump's trolling revival of the eugenics movement.

Much is being made of how his praise of the "good (Nordic) genes" of Minnesotans and "racehorse theory" is inspired by the rhetoric of Nazi Germany. But none of these current critics add that Adolf Hitler was himself directly inspired by the American eugenics movement that held sway in the interwar years of the 20th century. The Nuremberg Laws barring Jews from full status as German citizens contain numerous glowing references to America's racist Jim Crow laws.

 The designated targets of xenophobic exclusion from the US in the early decades of the century were Southern and Eastern Europeans, mainly Italians and Jews. The latter group was later denied refugee status and barred by draconian US immigration laws from entering the country to escape Nazi oppression. Tens of thousands of Jews are believed to have been killed when they were forced to return to Nazi-controlled territories.

Trump's allusion to racehorse theory actually stems from an American book called "The Passing of the Great Race" published by Charles Scribner & Sons in 1916 and heavily promoted and praised by politicians, intellectuals and such media mainstays as Good Housekeeping, The Saturday Evening Post and the New York Times. Its author, Madison Grant, was once widely lauded as one of the leading thinkers and environmental activists of the Progressive Era.

It's no surprise that forced sterilization, along with xenophobia as government policy, is also making a comeback. Anybody who is shocked, shocked that imprisoned migrant women are reportedly undergoing forced hysterectomies in a  Georgia ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) prison shouldn't be. Laws upholding sterilizations of the "unfit" were on the books in many states until fairly recently. The irony that these procedures are now allegedly being performed under a Republican administration which purports to be anti-birth control should not be lost on us. The purported religious principles of the "right to life" crowd is simply a fig leaf serving to mask their real agenda, which is the empowerment and enrichment of the ruling classes though the debasement of women, minorities  and let's face it, just about anybody who has no power and no money.

Trump may be a throwback to an era when racism and xenophobia were openly celebrated and championed by the most respectable elements of American society. But he is certainly no anomaly in the big historical picture.

And speaking of the Supreme Court: it has never expressly overturned its ignominious Buck v Bell decision, an oversight which theoretically makes the reported ICE sterilizations perfectly legal. In the 1927 opinion against Carrie Bell, a woman wrongfully committed to a Virginia asylum for the "feebleminded" after her rape by the son of her wealthy foster parents who'd used her as their personal maid, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote (relying upon the fake "science" which claimed that deviance and imbecility are passed down from generation to generation):

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, not Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was actually the first liberal rock star of the Supreme Court, thanks in large part to the mainstream media marketing and fawning by his elite peers. Lionel Barrymore even played him in a hagiographic movie.

And speaking of irony - First Amendment champion Holmes also wrote the opinion which upheld Woodrow Wilson's reactionary Espionage Act, the law under which Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was indicted. Confined to a Dickensian British prison while his extradition trial proceeds, Assange is essentially being punished for exposing American war crimes and political corruption. The First Amendment itself is effectively on trial, while mainstream corporate media remains largely silent.

And that leads me to my final question. Why the hell do we even have a Supreme Court? It has become more than ever the equivalent of the archaic and unelected class of priests which have always existed in authoritarian regimes. The highest court is neither the check nor the balance that our own overly-honored Pantheon of Founders envisioned.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, that great 19th century literary critic of American pathology, reminds us that neither right wing authoritarianism nor liberal hypocrisy nor personality cults nor culture wars are anything new under the Trumpian sun. From his novel The House of the Seven Gables about the execution of Matthew Maule, an accused witch:

"He was one of the martyrs to that terrible delusion which should teach us, among its other morals, that the influential classes, and those who take upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob. Clergymen, judges, statesmen - the wisest, calmest, holiest persons of their day - stood in their inner circle round about the gallows, loudest to applaud the work of blood, latest to confess themselves miserably deceived."

RIP-Roaring RBG Coverage

I'll leave the "live updates" on Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death to the New York Times. Ditto for the overwrought canonization of a judicial bureaucrat marketed for the past decade or so as a "living icon" and a "rock star." Because if anybody was a beneficiary of liberal identity politics and the mass marketing of image, it was certainly "The Notorious RBG."

 

Therefore, in this Age of Marketed Wokeness, any mention of Ginsburg's Supreme Court decisions siding with the police over ordinary citizens likely will be buried right along with her. Admittedly, some bold obituary writers are ever so delicately tip-toeng around her whimsical friendship with the late rabid reactionary Justice Antonin Scalia. This is being breezily dismissed as comity among colleagues in an exclusive venue. It's similar to Bernie Sanders calling Joe Biden "a good friend of mine" despite their policy differences. You see, our rulers co-exist in an exalted realm. We mere mortals, on the other hand, are viciously and unreasonably divided against one another. Or so we are told by the ruling class's media propagandists, who rely upon fomenting divisions among the citizenry so that they may go about their exalted business of screwing the citizenry and redirecting the wealth of the citizenry to the oligarchs.

I suppose we should at least be grateful that unlike her Supreme Court colleague Elena Kagan, Ruth didn't also go on violent animal-hunting junkets with "Nino."

So before the accolades fade into the ether and before the warm body is even decently buried, the Narrative is of course all about RBG's replacement. Will Donald Trump be able to force through a nominee before the election or in a theoretical lame duck session?

 

If Trump does get his way, but then Joe Biden wins the presidency by virtue of being the designated negatively charged force to neutralize Trump, will he and a Democratic majority then proceed to pack the court by finally ending the filibuster? After all, his good friend Bernie did predict that the right-wing Biden will magically transform himself into FDR if  only we hold our noses and give the man who created the Prison-Industrial Complex one more chance. 

I'm not holding my breath. Both parties love the filibuster when they're in the majority, and pretend to hate it when they're in the minority. So, as Biden himself likes to say, "Nothing will fundamentally change."

 

You might remember that back in 2011, when the Dems still held the Senate majority, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell were every bit as palsy-walsy as RBG and Nino were, even almost as tight as Bernie and Joe. They made a "gentleman's agreement" that neither one of them would ever abuse their filibuster privileges. And we all know how that worked out in the Republicans' favor, with the full wink-wink complicity of the feckless Dems.

 

 Reid, gentleman punk that he was, did the same thing a year later, but only after sternly threatening a few minor tweaks to prevent the GOP from flouting democracy in too impolite a manner. Of course, now that both he and Barack Obama are out of office, they're both falling all over themselves demanding that the filibuster be forever and permanently buried right along with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose own dying wish was not to be replaced by the current president. 

The most that Reid eventually accomplished was the imposition of the really scary-sounding "nuclear option" the following year, in order to prevent the filibustering of judicial nominees, allowing a simple up or down vote rather than the "super-majority" still required for the prevention of most legislation even remotely benefiting ordinary citizens. This feat by Harry Reid is what has allowed

for the confirmation of almost all Donald Trump's federal court nominees.  It was all part of the plan which allows Democrats to flail helplessly in public as they act out their designated role as the good cops and fundraise like mad for the #Resistance.

Filibustering, once glorified as the lone bravery of the principled Senator played by James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, actually has a more sinister original meaning. When it comes to Republican filibusters, they really do adhere to the original definition of the term: "irregular soldiers who act without authority from their own government, and are generally motivated by financial gain, political ideology, or the thrill of adventure".The etymology is as tortuous as the Senate itself: from the Spanish "filibustero" to the Dutch "vrijbuiter" to the English "freebooter."

 

So why stop at abolishing the filibuster? Maybe it's time to abolish the whole senate, or at least pack it to the gills with representatives based upon the population of any given state. That way, low-density states won't have the undemocratic, outsized power over us that they do now. That way, the iron claw of the oligarchy might even start to lose its grip and we can finally wrest the wealth of a nation right out of their cold dead hands.

 

 Now, wouldn't that be a nuclear option of a change that we can all believe in!