Manufacturing Discontent

 "Your (sic) not gonna hate your way to Medicare For All," hatefully sneered a recent anonymous commenter on one of my numerous posts on the subject.

Once I'd relegated the comment to the spam bucket to join thousands of its brethren from both the Right and the United Center, I marveled at how low the "discourse" has descended, when the expressed desire that one's fellow human beings enjoy the same guaranteed health care that every other advanced civilization on earth considers to be a basic human right can possibly be construed as "hate."

Hate for whom, exactly? 

Well, given that President Joe Biden and his corporate Democratic Party are adamantly opposed to this basic human right, and given that Biden and the corporate Democratic Party are nonetheless being almost universally praised as human rights champions despite perpetuating violent militarism, anti-immigrant xenophobia and fealty to the uber-wealthy entities that finance their campaigns, I concede that it is accurate to say that I hate them with a pure, unyielding passion. And since that, in turn, also makes me a dreaded "purist,"  then I might as well just heartily welcome the hatred of the haters of hate.

Media critic Alan MacLeod has written a very enlightening article for FAIR on the cult of "divisiveness" which is being wholly manufactured and disseminated by the scribes of the elite for the sole and ultimate benefit of the elites who pay their salaries. 

 Such broadly popular programs as the minimum wage increase, single payer health care, and reversal of capitalism-engendered climate change are often characterized by establishment media organs as "stoking divisions," "polarizing," "controversial," "risky," "contentious," "looks good on paper," "the math doesn't add up," and the like.

Any word or phrase will do, just so long as the pathological hatred that the ruling elite harbors for the masses of people is carefully disguised by gaslighting and concern-trolling. Otherwise, the estimated 70 to 80 percent of the citizenry in favor of a single payer public insurance program will never be convinced that they're completely nuts for daring to demand universal, guaranteed, government-sponsored health care. We have to be made to feel guilty about punishing people in love with their precarious, pricey employment-based coverage and condemning the insurance adjustors who work so responsibly hard to deny our claims into lives of penury and maybe even homelessness.

As if on cue, therefore, the New York Times has published a front page screed placing the blame for "divisiveness" not so much on the corporate media working overtime to manufacture the discontent, but upon the media consumers themselves, whose pre-existing feeble hate-brains are only being finessed by actors employed by corporate, consolidated media. It's a remarkable sleight of pen (or keyboard) by scribe Nate Cohn, given how cleverly and stealthily he transmutes this manufactured discontent from top-down propaganda into a powerful, dangerous, bottom-up, grassroots "sectarianism" reminiscent of religious wars both past and present.

The gist of it is that the people themselves, the great unwashed ignorant rabble, are the real threat to democracy. Elites, unite!

In Cohn's telling, you see, there is no such thing as the class war. There is no rich vs poor, or poor vs rich. It is solely about Democrats vs. Republicans. Whether you know it or not, your prime identity as a human being in America is your fealty to a political party. You are either a Trump supporter or a Biden supporter.  There will be no coloring outside of these lines, for fear that the elite media's narrative center will not hold. Cohn writes:

Whether religious or political, sectarianism is about two hostile identity groups who not only clash over policy and ideology, but see the other side as alien and immoral. It’s the antagonistic feelings between the groups, more than differences over ideas, that drives sectarian conflict....

  And as mass sectarianism has grown in America, some of the loudest partisan voices in Congress or on Fox News, Twitter, MSNBC and other platforms have determined that it’s in their interest to lean into cultural warfare and inflammatory rhetoric to energize their side against the other.

Cohn puts the chicken before the egg in that last paragraph. It wasn't the corporate propagandists who stoked the "sectarians" with their own inflammatory rhetoric, making enormous profits for their sponsors in the process. Cohn implicitly blames the audience itself. Were it not for the pre-existing hateful rabble, those noble propagandists would never have left the safety of their desks and studios to venture forth into the vast American wasteland to soak up and report on all that grassroots hatred and angst, which has nothing whatever to do with their own outlets broadcasting hours upon hours of Donald Trump (not to mention breathlessly broadcasting hours upon hours of his empty podium with themselves as the celebrity warm-up acts) to foment more discord for more profit and sky-high ratings.

To hear Cohn and his cohort tell it, I have nothing better to do than to castigate my neighbors over their support of, or opposition to, the "cancelling" of Dr. Seuss.  Americans are divided into only two camps: the Trump lovers and the Biden lovers. And they hate each other's guts. That they have been encouraged to scapegoat one another through such top-down neoliberal job-destroying policies as NAFTA and the corporate destruction of organized labor and the deregulation of finance is, strangely enough, never even mentioned in Cohn's "political memo."

He breathlessly continues:

One-third of Americans believe that violence could be justified to achieve political objectives. In a survey conducted in January, a majority of Republican voters agreed with the statement that the “traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” The violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 suggests that the risks of sustained political violence or even insurgency can’t be discounted.

Left unmentioned is the US ruling elites' own sustained agenda of state-sanctioned violence, from this country's estimated one thousand military bases throughout the world, its status as the world's biggest arms dealer, its legalization of assault weapons for private ownership, and its primo status as Incarceration Nation, housing more Black prisoners today than there were enslaved people immediately prior to the Civil War. 

There has always been class sectarianism you can believe in, here in these United States, and it was spawned and constantly nurtured by capitalism and the unfettered wealth of the greedy few.   

Of course, since the media is still so enveloped in its Biden honeymoon swoon, Cohn also has no choice but to delve shallowly into his self-censoring hive-brain and to cast Joe Biden as the anti-sectarian hero who wants nothing more than to bring Democrats and Republicans together for the kind of incestuous orgy that has always worked out so well for the elites who bankroll the much more desirable state-sanctioned brand of social, economic and physical violence.

After spending whole paragraphs bemoaning how a nation full of sectarian folks like you and me are turning on one other, Cohn abruptly and without warning completely contradicts himself:

The median voter prefers bipartisanship and a de-escalation of political conflict, creating an incentive to run nonsectarian campaigns.

I feel so divided right now after reading that journalistic feat of bipolar disorder that I don't know whether to flee North in a contentious search for Santa Claus, or to completely blow my quickly dwindling $1400 stimulus check on a controversial trip to the South Pole to commune with the Antarctic penguins while there's still an ice shelf and no Green New Deal in sight.

 There are, after all, only ever two Manichean choices in this life. Corporate media tells me so.  And so did unindicted war criminal George W. Bush, who upon the illegal invasion of Iraq so famously and originally proclaimed to the whole world: "You are either with us or against us."

Fast forward to a Sunday morning CBS gabfest, and this same George Bush now bemoans that people are so "polarized" that they can't even imagine him being friends with Michelle Obama, who once called him "a very funny man" and almost single-handedly paved the way for his reputation rehab in liberal circles.

Though she didn't specify whether he is funny ha-ha or funny-scary, Bush explained in that endearingly narcissistic folksy fashion of his that "anybody who likes my sense of humor, I immediately like."

Duopoly, Inc. You're Either For It Or Against It

Putting a Humanitarian Spin On Xenophobia

In order to prevent thousands of Central American migrants from making those dangerous journeys from dangerous countries, whose danger to human lives stems in large part from dangerous CIA/Pentagon death squads enabling military right-wing coups and propping up corrupt puppets, the Biden administration is now installing more native police and military guards than there are refugees at various border crossings.

It's a way to "discourage" refugees from ever leaving their climate-ravaged, violence-torn homes in the first place. And let's be honest. It takes the heat off Joe Biden, who is getting lambasted left and right for the abysmal conditions of imprisoned migrants, with the added insult of getting his carefully cultivated neo-progressive persona tarnished. 

Press Secretary Jen Psaki announced on Monday that the White House has made deals with Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras (where a 2009 military coup with the passive-aggressive compliance, if not direct assistance, of the Obama administration, ousted the socialist democratically-elected president) to repel or arrest - if not something even worse - would-be refugees.

Or, as the New York Times spins it, this draconian measure is only being implemented for the good of the refugees, to protect them from "making a dangerous trip North." The Biden administration will beneficently arrange for these desperate people to be turned back, jailed or even tortured or shot at places far, far away from the prying eyes of the American people - who already are getting an eye-full of the shameful conditions in pediatric "detention shelters" on our side of the border.

It's a variation on the solution devised by the kinder gentler administration which had so ostentatiously banned Bush-era torture. The Democrats simply outsourced their own torture to friendly authoritarian countries, and euphemized the outsourcing as "extraordinary rendition." 

And then there were those therapeutic "surgical" drone strikes that made future Abu Ghraib photographic scandals far less likely, mainly because remote-controlled Predators left so few intact bodies around to provide any embarrassing evidence. 

From Monday's Times:

Mexico has informed the United States that it will maintain 10,000 troops at its own southern border, aiming to double the number of migrants that it stops from traveling north, Ms. Psaki said. Guatemala has added 1,500 troops to its border with Honduras and has set up a series of a dozen checkpoints along the route that many migrants take as they head to the United States.

She also said that Honduras recently “surged” 7,000 police and troops to disperse a contingent of migrants that had gathered to make the trip north seeking refuge.

“The objective is to make it more difficult to make the journey, and make crossing the border more difficult,” Ms. Psaki said.

This is the exact same policy continued less than successfully by Donald Trump. However, the announcement that Biden is renewing it is somehow not eliciting anywhere near the same levels of outrage from the corporate press and Democratic lawmakers who decried the cruelty of outsourcing xenophobic US policy to repressive, corrupt regimes and police agencies only a few short years ago. The difference, of course, is that Trump made no effort to spin the cruelty into sanctimony and made no effort to play nice with Mexico. The Democratic side of the duopoly for its own part has always striven mightily to put the humanitarian gloss on the bipartisan, international human rights abuses that this country is so famous for. Trump was more interested in bellowing about "shithole countries" to rile up his base. Democrats talk up a kind, caring  game to placate their liberal base.

For example, Vice President Kamaa Harris is promoted by the Times as  leading a valiant effort to "improve the conditions" in the corrupt, devastated areas from which the refugees are fleeing. At the same time, these refugees are also being denigrated and dehumanized by the Biden administration and friendly establishment press as a militant "surge" that is threatening to breach our suddenly-precious border wall. The bellicose rhetoric is so ingrained in all aspects of foreign policy that there seems to be nothing that they can't or won't append their war jingo to.

The Times article uncritically puts a final spin on what is, essentially, a threat and a warning to an eminently disposable population:

The agreements with the countries are an early test of the cooperation that Ms. Harris will need in order to succeed in that mission.

“These discussions are ongoing, over a period of time and take place at several levels of the government, both here and within these countries, Ms. Psaki said.

Translation: if these violent and historically corrupt regimes don't do what the US imperium orders in order to quell the "surge" of their own people - cast almost as enemy combatants in need of some tough love, rather than as people fleeing for their very lives from violence and famine -  then Uncle Sam won't be forking over any more dollars to prop up their violent and corrupt regimes.

And if people do have to suffer and die, Psaki smarmily dog-whistles, there will be so many players and so many places involved in the abuses that the naming of any individual culprits will be impossible, not to mention unnecessary and undesirable.

This outsourcing of weaponized US immigration policy, moreover, will also make it costly and inconvenient for a US media conglomerate owned by only five or six corporations to bother setting up bureaus in southern Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala in order to cover the plights of thwarted refugees. Covering the occasional Rio Grande drowning and kids sleeping under Mylar blankets behind bars is cheap, it's easy, and it's close enough to home to keep the domestic culture wars alive, and the ratings higher. 

Why else is this whole shameful tale being constantly reported as a "border crisis" rather than the Global South climate disaster and capitalism-spawned human catastrophe that it really is?

(Hint: Follow the money. Remember who sponsors cable news. Here's looking at you, Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Financialized Capital.)

Biden Just Can't Hide His Neoliberalism

 I know it's considered a faux pas in polite media and Democratic circles to criticize Joe Biden, but a close reading of his latest speech, touting his proposed infrastructure bill, does reveal more than a few troubling "tells."

The first, as outlined by modern monetary theorist Stephanie Kelton in a New York Times op-ed, is Biden's obsession with "pay-fors" and his continued harping on debts and deficits. His nearly $2 trillion in "infrastructure" spending would likely be spread out over an unnecessarily long period of time, and it's not nearly enough to cure what ails us. It focuses not so much on specific needs and specific solutions, but on costs. If the money, as it is wont to do, winds up in the usual hands of privateers and consultants, it will not circulate through the economy. A lot of it will be hoarded. 

"It’s honest, it’s fair, it’s fiscally responsible and it pays for what we need and reduces the debt over the long haul," Biden bragged this week, in a distinct echo of the centrist rhetoric of the Pete Peterson Foundation and other austerian think tanks bankrolled  by the oligarchy. True, these ruling class narrative-builders now largely agree that deficits don't matter quite so much as they once did, given the emergency of the pandemic and social unrest and the resulting imminent threat to capitalism itself. But once the immediate crisis is over, and the aid money likely privatized to the fullest extent possible, then debts and deficits will begin to matter again, and with a vengeance.

 Rather than just borrow money at zero or subzero interest rates, rather than minting a trillion-dollar coin or two or ten as allowed by the Constitution, Biden would instead tax incomes above $400,000, raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent (far too modest) and, in a nod to economist Thomas Piketty, impose a global wealth tax to discourage the use of offshore tax shelters. He does not mention anything about his own home state of Delaware being a tax shelter in its own right, thanks in large part to his own bank-friendly congressional legislation. Lobbyists are no doubt devising loopholes even as we speak. 

Biden's plans admittedly do sound downright progressive. But with Bad Cop Senator Joe Manchin formally announcing his opposition to ending the filibuster, and Pope-Queen Elizabeth MacDonough ( a/k/a the Senate parliamentarian) bringing up the rear to nix passage of reconciliation bills requiring only a 51-vote majority, Biden can propose anything he wants and rest assured that most of his proposals benefiting the ordinary people he claims to champion will remain just that - proposals.

So for all the populist rhetoric stuffed in his infrastructure speech the other day, there remained a number of disturbing neoliberal buzzwords and talking points besides "deficit" and "pay-for" that should make our hackles rise.

Examples:

But it also is a blueprint for infrastructure needed for tomorrow, not just yesterday, tomorrow. For American jobs, for American competitiveness.

That's the lead paragraph, signaling right off the bat that Biden is more concerned with US hegemony and cutthroat competition than he is with the well-being of "folks." The race to win the Superpower battle against China is the underlying theme of his entire speech. Our high-speed rail has to be better than their high-speed rail. It just has to be. In order to regain the respect of the rest of the world, we have to restore our place as Number One. Otherwise,  the rest of the world will not do our bidding and bend the knee, like in the good old days.

Next, he enthuses about the transcontinental railroad and interstate highway system. The former, completed largely by the near-slave labor of Chinese immigrants and the use of Chinese-invented dynamite, had the core goal of attracting - oftentimes duping - white settlers to the heartland to help exterminate the Indians and enrich the robber barons. The latter was a Cold War project to make it easier to evacuate after a nuclear war with Russia and to sell more cars and polluting gas.  Biden signals that cutthroat neoliberalism is by no means dead with these words:

We need to start seeing infrastructure through its effect on the lives of working people in America. What is the foundation today that they need to carve out their place in the middle class to make it.

Ask not what your country can do for you. Arm yourselves instead with your knives and prepare to fight the next battle in the Hobbesian war of All Against All. Solidarity, my ass.

Now, to his credit, Biden does get in a subtle dig at the man he rather dismissively calls "Barack" and his infamous phony sip of Flint water which so cruelly substituted for a presidential public health disaster declaration and a massive federal aid package, including free health care, for the people of Flint:

Ask a teacher or a childcare worker if having clean drinking water, non contaminated drinking water in our schools, in our childcare centers, is part of that foundation. When we know that the lead in our pipes slows a child’s development when they drink that water.

Then again, nor does Biden himself declare a public health emergency in Flint, where lead not only will remain in the bodies of children for their entire lives, but whose own future children will likely be born damaged as a result of the contamination that was deliberately allowed to happen by a whole slew of elected officials. This points to the deliberate lack of specificity in the infrastructure proposal. Come on, man!

Then there was this heartbreaking nugget:

Ask our wounded warriors and military families. To my Republican colleagues in congress, should we modernize VA hospitals, update them?

Not one word about defunding the for-profit and increasingly outsourced and privatized United States military or ending the wars that produce all the wounded warriors. And of course, not one word about the lack of health care for people in foreign lands who are the targets and collateral damage of American imperialism.

Like his former boss, meanwhile, Biden is all fired up and ready to go:

 Over 500,000 charging stations on the highways we are going to build to accommodate electric vehicles, so we can own the future. Construction workers and engineers building modern hospitals and homes for American families. Healthcare workers, steel workers, folks who were I work in the cutting edge labs.

Notwithstanding that garbled last sentence, this is an eerie flashback to Obama's own Win the Future campaign slogan. Notice that neoliberal rhetoric is never about the here and now, it is always about making life better in the ephemeral someday for regular people. "Owning the future" does not put food on the table today, despite the Democrats' temporary increase in food stamp benefits, which now pay for maybe two weeks' worth of groceries instead of the previous one week.

The speech now descends into a series of garbled sentences that nonetheless impart some unintentional truth. The underground spring of neoliberalism and rank militarism hidden just beneath Biden's heap of rich neo-populist soil begins to bubble with a xenophobic vengeance right up to the surface:

It’s not part of my speech, but I promise you, you’re all going to be reporting over the next six to eight months how China and the rest of the world is racing ahead of us in the investments they have in the future. Attempting to own the future. The technology, quantum computing, investing significant amounts of money in dealing with cancer and Alzheimer’s. That’s the infrastructure of a nation.

Biden's definition of infrastructure repair is all about one group of predatory capitalists competing against another group of predatory capitalists. China might win instead of Elon Musk and Bill Gates! And meanwhile, please stop with the hate crimes against Asians, which have nothing at all to do with our leaders' own disgustingly bellicose rhetoric.

It gets worse:

So America can lead the world that is as it’s historically done. That’s why I brought back scientists into the White House.

Not to make people's lives better, although it could be a fringe benefit. The purpose of science is to treat disease at a profit and to improve technology and transportation so that American capitalism can win.

Almost fifteen minutes into his speech, Biden really begins to go off the high-speed rails, at an almost reckless rate of belligerence.

We need to think. Look, do we think the rest of the world is waiting around? We’re not going to make those kinds of investments the rest of world’s saying. Take a look. Do you think China is waiting around to invest in this digital infrastructure or in research and development? I promise you they are not waiting. But they’re counting on American democracy to be too slow, too limited, and too divided to keep pace.

Before you know it, China may even start imitating Russia and placing cheesy Facebook ads in order to sow division among Americans. Biden thinks that the average desperate American family also wants nothing more than the opportunity to traverse the whole width of America at a high rate of belligerent speed. It's road rage change you can believe in.

Now, about how we're gonna pay for it. Biden wants to tax the rich and increase taxes on corporations -  not to punish deserving jerks like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, of course, but rather to bring some feel-good parity between rapacious billionaires and the barely-making-it. This is a standard neoliberal talking point, a throwback to Obama's "Share the Sacrifice" sermons admonishing the foreclosed and evicted to find common ground with those doing the foreclosing and the evicting. Because we're all in this together!

 Not fleece them. (the corporations)  28%. If you’re a mom and dad, a cop, firefighter, police officer, et cetera you’re paying close to that in your income tax.

Biden seems to think that cops and police officers are two different jobs. Speaking of which, his much-ballyhooed executive order for mild gun control will apparently not be accompanied by an order recalling all that deadly military hardware and assault weaponry from even small-town police departments under the "community policing" initiatives he spearheaded as vice president.

The divisions of the moment shouldn’t stop us from doing the right thing for the future.

Or as Stephen Colbert lampooned the neoliberal concept of futurism back when he was still funny: "A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow."

Biden's concluding microburst of bombast would put Donald Trump himself to shame:

Tell the kids, the young people that work for me, I told my kids, when I go on college campuses, they’re going to see more change in the next 10 years then we’ve seen the last 50 years. We’re going to talk about commercial aircraft flying at subsonic speeds, supersonics speeds. Be able to figuratively, if we decided to do it traverse the world in about an hour, traveled 21,000 miles an hour. So much has changed. We have got to lead it.

This may sound like your grandpa on crack. But God love him and bless the troops, at least he fired (as opposed to firing up) the young people who worked for him because they admitted to past pot use. Because if you're too mellowed out on weed, how can you ever imagine circumnavigating the globe at centrifugal force? 

Thar the Movie Mogul Blows! Thar the Landlord Breaches!

You will no doubt be impressed to learn that Yours Truly (actually, the plight of Yours Truly) is the subject of the latest "Ask Real Estate" feature in the New York Times. Before going further, it would probably be simplest and less redundant to first read the Times column, and especially the reader comments so far, and most especially the top-rated reader comment, plus a follow-up, from "Sardonickyblog."  

Cartoon Version of Me (credit Nadia Pillon, NY Times)

To synopsize: besides fighting for a then-scarce dose of the Covid vaccine, I have also recently been doing battle with the management of my apartment building. This is something of a proxy, or two-front, battle also involving what is known locally as "Hollywood East," which invaded our small bucolic complex late last month without so much as a by-your-leave, in order to make a Major Motion Picture.

Called "The Whale," the film is about a gay guy trapped in his apartment because grief over the death of his partner has caused him to eat himself up to a morbidly obese 600 pounds. For a script seemingly devoted to checking several identity politics boxes, you'd think they'd at least be woke enough to find a title that isn't quite so insulting to the differently-weighted.

Then again, the actual play upon which the script is based was written during those insensitive, dark-ages coma years that plagued the country for centuries

If you've read my Times comment, you'll appreciate the black humor of a movie about a 600-pound guy trapped in his apartment actually resulting in real-life people, like my daughter and me, becoming trapped in our apartments.

You'll also appreciate the arch hilarity of a multimillion-dollar production posting "off-limits" signs on tables laden with Doritos and other salty and sugary processed snacks at various spots around the complex during the film shoot. I never did find out whether this forbidden junk food bonanza was supposed to be catering for the crew, or whether it was props for the 600-pound lead character. (I looked out my window in vain for Brendan Fraser in a fat suit, but since his character is housebound, he was perhaps stuck in his apartment on the interior sound stage several miles south of the outdoor location scenes.)

Zoom In to See the Neon Pink Off-Limits Sign (photos by Kat Garcia)

 My letter to the New York Times, meanwhile, was edited to omit the part where I questioned my landlord's breach of tenants' rights to the "quiet enjoyment" of our digs, known as the implied warranty of habitability. As a matter of fact, the only sources Ronda Kaysen quoted were from the movie industry. There was not one landlord-tenant attorney or tenant advocacy expert in the bunch. 

Then again, this is the Sunday New York Times real estate section. It is usually replete with stuff like how hard it is to score an apartment on the Upper West Side for under two million bucks, and myriad other housing agonies of the rich and well-connected.

 So I was pretty surprised that they ran my own letter. It was probably the Hollywood angle. We are so immersed in an unhealthy celebrity culture in this country, that sometimes overwrought #Oscars So White stories actually seem to compete with the continuing mass social murder of Black and Brown people who are sickening and dying in such unconscionable disproportionate numbers during the Covid pandemic.

Anyway, the gist of the Times's advice to me was to suck it up while still being a "squeaky wheel." Since movie production companies are so flush with cash, insider experts said, I should have just shaken them down for a cut of the action. This did not happen, mainly because a few days before shooting began, before the giant crane blocked my view, before our front door was blocked by a cameraman, before blinding klieg lights flooded our living room past midnight, a very personable location manager had flat-out lied to my daughter about where they would be on the property, assuring her we would not be inconvenienced.

Besides, I don't think it was my place or my job to schmooze or cajole the movie crew, since the owner(s) of the apartment building are the ones who signed the location contract and pocketed probably thousands of dollars, without even consulting or reimbursing us, the tenants who pay the rent. When I twice asked the off-site property management company for a rent abatement, they simply ignored me. Maybe I would go away!

In fact, as the passive-aggressive mass "notification" email to tenants from 360 Property Management makes all too abundantly clear, there would be no compensation for renters. In fact, we should feel as blessed and excited as they do about "our community" being in a movie. And why wouldn't they be excited, since they double-dipped, collecting full rent from the tenants while they pocketed a hefty location fee from the producers? This is on top of a 25 percent rent increase imposed by the landlord in the last two years. Gentrification has been further exacerbated this past year by wealthy pandemic refugees from New York City either renting or buying at hugely inflated prices the already-limited housing stock in this upstate locale.  The extraction of maximum value from property certainly exceeds the rights of mere mortals. This feudalistic mindset certainly restores the term "landlord" to its original meaning!

So for me, this was the straw that broke the camel's back:

 Good afternoon everyone!   

I know that many of you have heard that there will be a film crew on site in the upcoming week.   

Please see the attached Letter from the production crew of the feature film The Whale. 

We appreciate your understanding during the dates of March 23-26th as they film.  

The most significant impact will be on the day of March 25th when they are asking that you move your vehicles from the South paved lot to any of the other visitor spaces or on the north side of the building.  The crew will have a couple of vehicles on site that are period appropriate for the time period during which the story takes place. ( I believe the 1980's ) 

For your information,  we are also sharing the film crew covid protocols.    

It's exciting that our home community will be in a feature film .... thank you for your understanding!  

<WH_Residents Letter Bella Terra.pdf>

<the whale new a24 health and safety protocols v7 012921.pdf>

So right now I'm tilting at the joint windmills of Entertainment Finance Capital and the reincarnation of Old Man Trump. This is despite Plutarch warning two centuries ago that "what thing whatsoever besides cometh within the chaos of this monster's mouth, be it beast, bird, or stone, down it goes all incontinently that foul great swallow of his, and perisheth in the bottomless gulf of his paunch."

So call me crazy or call me Ishmael for all I care, but on Monday I gathered all the pertinent documents and ignored emails to management that I could find, and filed a probably very quixotic complaint with the New York state attorney general's office.  I am not a lawyer, so I don't know whether I have a case for landlord harassment, fraud, breach of contract, constructive eviction, unlawful imprisonment, all of the above, or none of the above.

But complaining sure feels a whole lot better than helplessly blubbering.

Tilting At Vaccine Windmills

 Sorry about the lack of posts lately, but I've been fighting a few battles on, so to speak, the home front.

Main battle: Like many of you, I'd been scrambling to score the Covid vaccine. In New York state, where I live, the quest for the shots has been something right out of Kafka. Our local county officials brag day after day about the scores of sites (mainly chain drugstores) which are administering the vaccine. Day after day, they enthusiastically and helpfully list all the sites. Hope springs eternal, day after day, that this could finally be your lucky day in the lottery of bare survival. I spent countless hours over the past month obsessively clicking on every single one of these sites and links - only to be informed that I'd have to install an app on my phone to even get access to an application for an appointment. But never mind, because they are currently not taking any appointments anyway. 

It's classic bait and switch, on a grander scale than I have ever experienced in my life. It's  also excessively, gaslightingly cruel. It is especially sadistic in my state, given that New York has already creepily begun issuing "vaccine passports" for the lucky few. It even got me wondering if I was doing something wrong in my failure to get access to get an appointment to get vaccinated.

But it turns out that my quixotic quest for the Elixir has been the rule rather than the exception for the majority of people, in my state and in many other areas of the country. It is the epitome and most recent glaring symptom of the Failed State in which we live.

But miracle of miracles! In neighboring Orange County, the chief executive had taken to posting scarce appointment availabilities on his own personal website in the dead of night when crashes caused by desperate people are less likely.

  My son, who happens to work in the dead of night, pounced and made appointments for both me and my daughter at a "pod" only one hour's drive away from our home.

Long story short:  Steeling myself for another nightmare straight out of Kafka, I armed myself to the teeth with more forms of I.D. than even the Department of Motor Vehicles requires, fully prepared to beg right on my creaking knees for bureaucrats to find me valid enough to pass the final exam of deservedness.

So you can only imagine how stunned we were on Friday to be ushered like VIPs into a comparative Disney theme park at a local senior center. Scores of happy workers greeted us effusively. One of them even wore a Lion King shirt! We were immediately seated at a table and answered a few nonintrusive perfunctory questions before rolling up our sleeves and getting inoculated. 

We were offered bottled water by dozens of smiling people while we were seated in an observation area for the requisite 15 minutes.  The experience not only stunned me right out of my habitual cynicism, it restored my faith in humanity itself.

For those of you who still waiting, still struggling to score your own shots,  let me tell you that the feeling of doom and dread that departs from your psyche the minute you receive that first dose of elixir is an elixir in and of itself. On the downside, getting the shot does leave you with something akin to survivor guilt, knowing that so many people are still having problems getting theirs.

I have to quit now, because my arm still hurts like a bitch when I exert it. It's a great feeling, she said shamefacedly.

One windmill down, only about a few thousand left to go.  So stay tuned while I wait for all the ebullience to subside and for my cynicism to healthily return. Meanwhile, please feel free to leave a comment on your own quests to become meritocratic winners in the Golden Arm Sweepstakes, or for that matter, anything else that's on your minds.

Happy Easter!

Why Is Kamala Harris Canoodling With Austerians?

Vice President Kamala Harris is taking a fair amount of heat this week for partnering with notorious horndog Bill Clinton, of all people, for a discussion on women's issues during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Clinton has been serving a long stint in the media doghouse ever since the #MeToo movement gained momentum during the Reign of Trump Terror, and scandals ranging from the Monica Lewinsky saga to Clinton's association with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein started getting re-examined with fresh sets of woke eyes. Harris's marquee role at the Clintons' annual "Global University Initiative"  is therefore being widely lambasted as a ham-handed effort to both salvage Bill's tattered reputation and to unofficially re-cement the entire Clinton clan's role as major players in both the Biden administration and the Democratic Party.

As one editorial puts it, the very idea of Kamala Harris and Bill Clinton getting together to discuss "empowering women and girls of the world" is a bad joke, especially since the former president still considers himself a victim of the women and girls he has abused through the years. It's really hard to woke a comatose horndog, but Harris plans to give it the old college try anyway at her alma mater, Howard University.

What's being ignored in the critical coverage of this gabfest is that the occult purpose of the Clinton Global Initiative University is the imposition of crushing austerity on the women and girls (and men and boys) of the world.  Not for nothing does major funding for this week's confab with Kamala Harris come from the Peter J. Peterson Foundation. Begun by the late Wall Street billionaire and deficit hawk sponsor of Barack Obama's so-called Cat Food Commission and its efforts to cut Medicare and Social Security, his think tank continues to spread the thoroughly debunked claim that government spending for the greater social good is bad for economic growth - a/k/a the unfettered growth of predatory capitalism.

Kamala Harris's participation in this oligarchic enterprise, which is now desperately trying to cloak itself in the masks of feminism and diversity, should disabuse us of the notion that the Biden administration is the most progressive one since FDR. With most of the relief measures in the "rescue" legislation - expanded unemployment insurance, modest food stamp increases and tax credits with direct cash disbursements to needy families with children - set to expire within the year, it should be obvious that their placement of a band-aid on the festering societal wound that they themselves created more than 40 years ago is mainly designed to placate an increasingly restive population.

The Clinton Global Initiative University continues to press for austerity, and it does so by infiltrating the nation's colleges and universities with the specious message that the economic pain of indebted students is due not to debt peonage imposed by greedy lenders, but by greedy older people depriving them, the young future leaders and budding entrepreneurs of America, of the success that they deserve.

"It's Up To Us," the students are instructed, to become politically engaged enough to willingly join the oligarchs in the austerity program. "Get Involved! Join the Movement!" the Clinton website urges, boasting that 131,000 college kids already have signed the pledge to become deficit hawks.

Among the solutions that the Clintons' Campus Crusade For Austerity urges the young people to clamor for is privatizing Medicare with a "premium support program," and raising the Social Security retirement age. It also suggests replacing the income tax with a "progressive consumption tax" - which many critics say is actually regressive, given that poor people must spend most of their incomes on necessities. 

Therefore, immediately after being empowered by Bill Clinton and Kamala Harris at Friday's CGIU "plenary session," participating students will meet privately in an "Office Hours" chat with Hilary Allen, the program director for It's Up To Us, along with "special guests" from media monolith Verizon, another co-sponsor of the conference. According to her bio on the Clinton Foundation website, Allen was inspired to become a "radical moderate" by billionaire Daniel Lubetzky,  founder of KIND snacks, who proved to her that as long as the KIND label is slapped on predatory capitalism, who cares about the actual hidden ingredients?

To that end, Hillary Clinton herself will join the fun, leading yet another plenary session conversation with the theme of kindness promotion, which is mainly achieved by Chelsea Clinton's "Too Small To Fail" initiative to combat poverty by reading to children in laundromats.

As for Kamala Harris, hopefully she will have soaked up so much kindness and empathy by canoodling with the Clintons that her upcoming junkets to Central American countries so devastated by neoliberal US plunder that record numbers of refugees are crossing the Mexico-US border, will convince those political bosses to keep their subjects from ever even reaching Mexico in the first place. This act of American empathy will be accomplished by billions of dollars in kind bribery cash to be paid directly to the political bosses.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, in other words, rumors of the death of the Neoliberal Project and its relentless imposition of austerity and pain on the suffering masses of the world have been greatly exaggerated, Rescue Plan or no Rescue Plan.

And stateside, at least 30 million retired, sick, poor or disabled people have yet to receive their $1400 "stimulus checks." It seems that Congress unkindly forgot to appropriate the funds for the Social Security Administration to compile a list of beneficiaries for the IRS. You know... the desperate people that the Clinton Foundation and its corporate sponsors want you to believe are stealing our futures.

The Purge of the Stoners

 It's a good thing that Barack Obama has modestly shot down all those pleas from his adoring fans to team up with his old pal Joe in some capacity in the new administration. Because as a self-confessed pothead in his younger days, even Obama might not have passed muster.

The Daily Beast reports that Biden has summarily purged "dozens of young White House staffers" who admitted past marijuana use, either by firing them, suspending them, or sentencing them to work from "remote locations." This crackdown came as something of a shock, given that the administration had previously assured job applicants that they wouldn't be rejected just because of a little recreational marijuana use in the distant past. Even staffers who indulged in the 14 states in which cannabis is now legal were canned.

The official explanation for the purge is that pot use, even past pot use, presents a potential national security risk. Not to mention an international security risk, given that Obama had created his own Kill List  and declared all those thousands of innocent bystanders blasted to smithereens by his drones to be terrorists - unless they were found innocent post-mortem. Which they never were, not only because their unidentifiable bodies were in pieces, but because Obama's serial killing spree had made it far too dangerous for US officials to travel to the scenes of the crimes in order to investigate their own crimes.

So it kind of makes you wonder what Joe Biden himself was smoking when he blabbed to George Stephanopoulos on ABC this week that he thinks Vladimir Putin is a cold-blooded killer who "will pay a price" - details of which will be announced at a later date. This ominous remark was strangely inserted right in the middle of what is being hyped as his American Rescue Tour.

  Since Biden is failing to rescue student debtors from their onerous burdens, it is therefore absolutely vital for him to reset the American mood from despair to one of fear of an outside enemy. Biden's idea of a rescue is not to forgive debt, but to give it tax-exempt status just in case a portion of it is ever erased. It was, after all, then-Senator Joe Biden himself who wrote the bill which bars the discharge of student debt in bankruptcy court. Owe till you die while Russia and China are sowing discord in our democracy.

Here's my take on the White House purge of the potheads. Biden could be reviving the War on Drugs to help promote his son Hunter's upcoming memoir detailing his own rescue from drug abuse. It was this addiction, we are asked to infer, which propelled Hunter on his own ruinous journey to national security riskiness, via his sketchy and very lucrative deals in Ukraine and China. Biden is simply giving the same tough love to his young staffers that he has given to his own son.

 Nobody gets a free pass... unless it is on Air Force Two on a drug-free nepotistic junket to Beijing.

Ever so coincidentally, in a newly-released report, the intelligence "community" officially now has "high confidence" that Russia was behind the New York Post's scoop on Hunter's shenanigans, published in the final weeks of the presidential campaign and purged from Twitter and from all respectable mainstream publications who feared losing access to power.  

According to the latest New York Times article in the Russiagate franchise,

While it was declassified by the Biden administration, the report is based on work done during the Trump administration, according to intelligence officials, reflecting the vastly different views that officers had from their political overseers, who were appointed by Mr. Trump.

The report rebutted yearslong efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to sow doubts about the intelligence agency's assessments that Russia not only wanted to sow chaos in the United States but also favored his re-election.

As you may have surmised by now, I am not a member of the "I Was So Wrong About Joe Biden, He Is the Greatest Progressive Since FDR!" Club. And I don't know about you, but all this scary talk about sowing doubt about the sowing of chaos just to sow doubt only makes me want to go out and score a lid and mellow out and then sow all the seeds from my stash.

We have to do whatever it takes to #Resist the Biden era's melding of the revived Partnership For a Drug-Free America with the Partnership for a Criticism-Free America. Because afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted are no longer what journalism is all about. What it does seem to be all about is the consolidated careerist media's access to the powerful, and the avoidance of cultural cancellation at all costs. 

There's a new designer drug going around that aims to get you high as a kite on one-time $1400 relief checks and temporary help in paying your health insurance shakedown artists.

The Biden team and its entire media chorus are nothing but pushers. Just Say No, before your brain fries like an egg.

Rescue: The Major and the Minor

The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan is a little bit like the saga of Biden's rescue dog. It seems that Major inflicted a "minor" injury on a White House lackey this week. Now, depending upon your point of view, both the bite and the bill are either boldly aggressive attacks portending future behavior,  or they're nothing but ineffectual nibbles that don't even leave a mark.

Whatever the case may be, I think it's safe to assume that Joe "nothing would fundamentally change" Biden would never tolerate any broken skin in the game on his watch.

Meanwhile, "landmark" and "sweeping" are only two of the gushing, go-to words the corporate media are using to hype the legislation expected to passed handily in the lower House and landing on Biden's desk for a triumphant televised signing ceremony. Gone are all the terrible memories of Donald Trump's own stingy approval of a mere $1,800 in direct cash aid to the majority of Americans last year. Because just as the fairytale princess once spun straw into gold, the Biden administration has magically transformed those promised $2,000 checks into $1,400 checks right before our very gullible eyes. It's a page right out of the playbook of that sly old yarn-spinner himself, Bill Clinton. It was he who set the centrist stage for all manner of austerian bait and switch gimmicks when he folksily and patiently explained, over and over again, why people simply cannot have nice things. "It's arithmetic!"

Therefore, the title of the latest episode: "$1,400 Is the New $2,000."

In this best of all possible Panglossian worlds, the American Rescue Plan will cut child poverty almost in half! Therefore, if you're a very lucky kid, you will not be among those left drowned at the bottom of the half-full glass.

But the private insurance predators? They not only will float buoyantly to the top, they'll be riding a wave. The plan vastly increases their government subsidies to a veritable tsunami of sensible, arithmetic-based windfall profit. Rather than enact even temporary single payer universal health coverage during this terrible pandemic, our leaders have instead rationally decided to fork over billions of dollars to surfer sharks in suits, so they may go about their normal business of denying our claims while collecting their co-pays, premiums and deductibles for services rendered within very strictly proscribed networks in the health care marketplace. 

So, if you're like the uninsured 64-year-old man who tested positive for Covid antibodies but negative on the molecular test, you are now personally on the hook for a $22,368 hospital bill and deemed ineligible for government reimbursement. And even if you're a Covid patient who passed all the tests but whose primary pre-existing condition was exacerbated by the virus, then you're out of luck too.

Gig workers, among other precarious people suffering through the economic effects of the pandemic, may or may not be helped by the American Rescue Plan, which will allow them to retain "skin in the game" by either shopping around for cheaper Obamacare product or getting a nice discount on their pricey employment-based Cobra plans. The New York Times reports that musicians and actors have lost their insurance coverage in droves over the past year, not only because they were out of work, but because predatory insurance companies raised their rates even as they reaped in record profits - courtesy of government subsidies which continued flowing in to their coffers unabated. Insurance companies justify raising the rates to "health care consumers" by pointing to the high costs of the pandemic to their investors.

The Rescue Plan will also bail out 185 multi-employer pension plans, thus saving the retirements of about a million people. It will not, however, extract this money from the private equity vultures who actually looted these pension plans in the first place.

In more rescue largesse in this best of all possible neoliberal worlds, student borrowers who have a portion of their debt forgiven will no longer be on the hook to the IRS for the phantom income derived from their erased debt. In other words, the tax man won't come after you for the wealth you derive from your negative bank account. It's the arithmetic, stupid!

But act now, because many if not most of the rescue plans contained in the Biden offer are set to expire in 2025, if not sooner.  This artificial and rather cynical cut-off date gives Democrats the ability to fund-raise like mad during the election year of 2024 as they "fight for" you with every pragmatic fiber of their beings.

Better to die slowly, in increments, than be thrown right to the dogs by those nasty old Republicans.

Unless, of course, the dog is Major Biden, who is just the latest actor in the Twitterverse culture wars so carefully manufactured to distract us from all our petty cares and worries.

Bite Me

America Has a Pope-Queen

 My first reaction upon learning that an obscure Senate parliamentarian named Elizabeth MacDonough had not only single-handedly nixed passage of a $15 minimum wage through the budget reconciliation process, but that Joe Biden "respected" her ruling, was one of absolute chagrin.  Here I was, along with millions of others, so hopelessly addicted to binge-watching The Crown on Netflix, that we didn't even realize we'd had our very own Queen Elizabeth this whole time. She'd been discreetly presiding over the Sceptered Isle of the Senate for the entire past decade!

Granted, she has been pretty easy to miss, given that she only speaks publicly once a year, and that speech is to an arcane youth group. This is not fair. The least she could do is deliver an annual Christmas address to the nation, if not ink a Netflix deal or at bare minimum, go on The View.

 So much for us vanquishing King George in the American Revolution. Admittedly, we in the United States have always craved a monarch, making Hollywood celebrities and rock stars our sloppy seconds. This inbred authoritarian longing also helps explain the fascination many of us in the Colonies have with vapid exiled multimillionaires Prince Harry and Meghan, who are set to regale royalty fans with their own two-hour Oprah tell-all next week. 

But since Harry's granny, Elizabeth II, is only a constitutional monarch, a figurehead with no real power, I think it's high time that Her Majesty's subjects erupt in jealousy for our possession of an all-American monarch who has even more power than our semi-democratically elected president. This unelected and secretive and unaccountable official is able, with the dismissive wave of her little royal finger, to order millions of her subjects to survive - with a stiff upper lip, of course - on $7.25 an hour. 

Joe Biden himself is such a stiff that he would never dream of demanding to know, along with millions of outraged minimum wage reform proponents, who just died and made her Queen.

Born-again self-proclaimed progressive, cosmetic/gender diversity booster, and good Catholic that he is, Biden has actually gone way beyond royalty deference and effectively elevated Elizabeth MacDonough to the status of Pope. Thanks to a Vatican ruling by one of the previous popes in Rome who declared himself infallible, every subsequent pope is deemed to be infallible. The Pope has a direct line to and from God himself. Nobody must ever question what the Pope says, no matter how bizarre or how cruel. When, for example, the Pope forbids Catholic women to use birth control and outlaws remarriage after divorce, and bans abortion even in cases of rape or incest, there are no grounds for appeal. 

Catholics don't like it much, but what can they do besides leaving the church or opening themselves up to excommunication? Biden says he doesn't like Queen-Pope Elizabeth's decision either, but he views it as so infallible that he dare not try to reverse it. 

For their own part, senior Democrats, including Kamala Harris, have also followed suit and pragmatically abandoned all hope for fear of entering the hell of party and donor retribution. Senators Ron Wyden and Bernie Sanders renounced their own workaround bill, which would have penalized major corporations for failure to pay employees at least $15 an hour, for the very plausible reason that major corporations would easily have found their own workarounds to the odious requirement of paying workers a decent wage. 

Therefore, with Biden's abject surrender to Elizabeth of the Senate, not even the Supreme Court can be prevailed upon to overrule the Parliamentarian and declare her de facto unitary powers to be unconstitutional. Not that the Court ever would, of course, entertain such a thing. The reactionary majority would likely reimpose slavery if they could, guided by their own cynical reliance on the glorified pantheon of slave-holding "originalist" writers of the Constitution. This infallible document is either to be literally interpreted as a Bible, or conveniently ignored whenever the bottom line of capitalism is threatened, or twisted into a subversive parody of itself when, for example, assault rifle profiteers and sociopaths can legally define themselves as well-ordered militias.

Joe Biden, reactionary originalist stiff that he also is, claims that his hands are tied on the parliamentary minimum wage defeat. His overruling or firing of Pope-Queen Elizabeth would be a mortal sin, punishable by condemnation by his financial backers, who also own and control the Democratic Party.

So, although theoretically his hands are not tied - because both Catholic dogma and his own electoral mandate do acknowledge the concept of free will - Joe Biden is afraid of catching hell from the oligarchs he serves, the pantheon of demi-gods presiding at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable who adamantly oppose a $15 minimum wage - which, by the way, should not be confused with a living wage, now estimated to be about $24 an hour at the bare survival minimum.

He did promise these movers and shakers that "nothing would fundamentally change" when he became the figurehead president. The infallibility of capitalism will never be challenged by him, loyal courtier that he is.

As he goes about the business of having no power, it turns out that even with his hands tied, he is still capable of dropping bombs on Syria without the approval of anybody, not even the Pope-Queen herself. Congress, however, theoretically does have the power to stop the bomb-dropping. But once again, the rule of adhering maniacally to the Constitution whenever it's convenient and blandly ignoring it whenever it's not, especially applies when it comes to the unitary executive's power to wage war and kill people whenever the mood hits him, or whenever the de facto kings in the profit-driven "defense" industry (the Pentagon) order him to.

Biden press secretary Jen Psaki, meanwhile, soothes that Biden will spend the next few days... or weeks (or months, or years) figuring out "the best path forward."  Whenever people are being denied nice things, politicians can always fall back on evoking the Bible. Joe Biden, even with his hands tied by a tangle of silly string of his own making, is made to sound as though he is a saint, forever and always seeking the way, the truth and the light.

While Joe Biden is bound, the rest of us gag.

The Mangling Munching Manchin Machine

(Say three times fast)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facebook Follies: Underhanded Down Under

 by Valerie Long Tweedie

What is going on between Australia and Facebook?

As you already probably know, news is very expensive to produce. Research, investigative journalism, and foreign bureaus with "feet on the ground" are expensive to fund. The main source of revenue for newspapers and news outlets is advertising, which has been declining since people have been getting more and more of their news on-line. News organizations that have gone on-line attract advertisers by keeping track of how many people go to their sites for news. But this is not enough.

Sadly, lots of small, local news outlets have had to go out of business and even the bigger ones are having to lay off journalists and other staff. This means the Fourth Estate and an independent media, which is the watchdog of our democracy, is in peril.

Facebook and Google, because they are the biggest beneficiaries of Australians linking news via their sites (FB made .7 BILLION last year off of Australians via advertising revenue but only paid a paltry 2.4% tax), have been asked to negotiate in good faith with the media companies to help offset some of their costs. Google, has done this. Facebook has been very belligerent about it from the start and threatened to cut all of Australia off of the FB platform.

What Facebook actually did on February 18 was block all news links not only coming out of Australia but also all international sources. So someone like me who links to U.S. sites in my FB comments has had all my links blocked. However, what they did that was really egregious was, in their efforts to take on the Australian government in a power play, they became very punitive. They cut off a lot of platforms like the Department of Health - right before we start our vaccine rollout on Monday.

 Why is this important? Because after years of encouraging organisations to use Facebook to distribute important information to the public (from which FB benefits through the gathering of information on all of us and then targeting advertising back to us - for a profit), they cut off a vital source of information on where to go for vaccines and links to places to sign up for vaccines in the middle of a pandemic. They have also blocked sites where people can go to get help if they are being abused or suspect children are being abused. They have blocked weather platforms in the middle of the summer - which means bushfire season in Australia - again, alerts to where fires are and how to avoid them. Cottage business-people like Sally, who has a tiny home hairdressing salon, or the woman who makes Thai food out of her kitchen and takes orders for dinner or community organisations like the local little league groups have all been abruptly cut off.

After giving away a product for "free" - which people have all signed onto - many probably not realising just how much personal information FB has been gathering on them and selling on for a profit - Facebook has suddenly cut them off. Why? Because Facebook wants its users to pressure the government to stop trying to make them contribute to the news media sources they benefit from.

So why should most FB users care if they are only sharing shallow content memes, recipes and pictures of their dogs? Because others are using FB and Google to access and share information in this highly technical world that is often very hard for many people to navigate. We should all care that a company that is acting very monopolistic is flexing its muscle against a very reasonable request from a sovereign nation simply because it doesn't want to share a little bit of the vast wealth it is getting from the citizens of that very sovereign nation.

Right now, Australia is a test case on two fronts. China is flexing its muscle against us - and turning back our products like fresh lobster and lumber at the Chinese ports - because our government has had questions about the origins of Covid 19, spoken out against the corporation Huawei and most importantly, because the Australian government has spoken against China's incursion into the South China Sea region. In the same way, Australia is a test case for how a powerful multinational tech company like Facebook can influence a sovereign country's laws and policies. The reason FB is fighting so hard is because this highly profitable corporation doesn't want other countries with equally stretched media outlets to follow suit. In essence, it doesn't want the gravy train to end. But it isn't just Facebook. Other powerful tech corporations are watching the power game and will also follow suit - as will many multinationals - if Australia blinks. This is why this fight is so important to all of us who want fair and democratic countries.

The question is do we want a democratic government (as imperfect as it is) with politicians we can vote in and out of office making the rules and laws for our country? Or do we want giant for-profit corporations making the rules and laws?

Note: Many of you who read this will ask, "Why is she on Facebook anyway?" I admit, my links to relevant news articles seem out of sync with what most "friends" are posting. These people do seem shallow and naïve in their belief that all will be well if they keep an upbeat attitude.

But how are we to educate others about the important issues if they only get their news from Fox or CNN or Facebook? They can and are being completely cocooned in their echo chambers of friends who are like them. Sometimes I want to give up and quit. And then someone makes a comment that they like what I am posting and that it is informative. I don't think I am changing the world. In fact, I know most people probably see my posts and scroll by. But we who know better, know these are perilous times and if we can reach only one person each, we can together make a difference. When I first found Sardonicky, I was very naïve about politics. I thought the NYT was a great source of accurate information and that my government was pretty much protecting my middle class interests. Over time and because of Karen's essays (and comments in the NYT) and many of the seasoned commenters on this site, I learned what was really happening in the world. The truth is heavy and hard for most people to hear and accepting the truth is a slow process.

Now, having said all that against Facebook. The reality is the Liberal government (The Republicans of Australia) is caving into pressure from the big corporate media in Australia - think Rupert Murdoch. Google has made a deal to pay for content but only with the big players. - Which means the little players are left to struggle along as always. The other issue is just because the big media players are getting millions a year (Murdoch's corporations are getting 30 million a year), there is no guarantee that this money is going to go to journalism. So the fight for truth and justice via the media might be a red herring.

I still come down on the side of thinking we need to limit the power of Facebook. The corporation claims that cutting off non-new platforms like weather, vaccine sites and little ma and pa sites was just a glitch and will be rectified. But this corporation has been threatening to do this for months, and has had months to plan its execution.

I suspect that every step has been calculated.

****

(Valerie Long Tweedie is a teacher living in Adelaide.)