Let's Hear It For Some Anti-Party Unity

"Well-played, Bernie," simpers Michelle Cottle of the New York Times today as she ever so "gently and gratefully" shoves Sanders into the memory hole that she and her cohort were so feverishly digging for him and for America for the better part of the last year.

Joe Biden is so great and such a savior that even the coronavirus couldn't keep legions of his fans away from the latest batch of Democratic primaries. 

Yes - Michelle Cottle really does come right out and gush that tens or hundreds of thousands of voters unnecessarily exposing themselves to infection is so well worth it so long as it achieves "party unity" and the removal of Donald Trump from office this November.

Cottle further insinuates that the pandemic will only get worse the longer that Sanders "reassesses" his campaign. His supporters must socially distance themselves, pronto, before he kills her. And then Joe Biden will give all of us an avuncular hug... or grope... or if we're really lucky, a long lingering hair-sniff.

 This primary began with a sprawling, at times overwhelming, field of candidates. Campaigns rose and fell and rose again as Democrats agonized over which contender had the best shot at defeating President Trump — their absolute top priority. Once actual voting began, the race quickly boiled down to two clear and competing visions: one of electrifying revolution and one of reassuring restoration.As is often the case in presidential politics, things could have broken a different way based on a thousand different factors. (Just ask Hillary Clinton about that.) But whatever hope Mr. Sanders had of wooing more people into his camp effectively died with the arrival of an apolitical black swan in the form of a pandemic.

When Biden won South Carolina and Barack Obama put his discreet thumb on the magical scales to effect a veritable party convention of centrists to nominate Uncle Joe, the pandemic was still only a blip on the media radar. Those were still the days when Russia was the only existential threat, newly encapsulated by Democratic propagandists in the person of Bernie Sanders. 

That the pandemic has had little to nothing to do with Bernie's defeat is beside the point when it becomes a talking point.

But in order to cover their own asses, all that Michelle Cottle and all the folks at the Times, the Post, and MSDNC have to do is pivot from red-baiting to disease-baiting Bernie Sanders. At the same time, they pretend that Biden's wins actually mean something.

Cottle cynically and cloyingly absolves the media of all blame for Bernie's losses , ridiculously claiming that he can't go on TV as much to make his case because the pandemic is interfering with all the positive coverage he allegedly would have gotten after their coverage of Amy Klobuchar's fifth place victory over Bernie's first place showing in Nevada. Or was it New Hampshire?

The thundering hooves of the mainstream media's horserace coverage are like the pitter-patter of tiny raindrops compared to the pandemic. The election has faded in importance in the space of a nanosecond, but still they persist in obsessively fact-checking Donald Trump, as though his lies were more deadly than the lethal virus.

Who cares about Biden or any of them when the lack of toilet paper is second only to the daily overriding fear of the premature deaths of ourselves and our loved ones?

The corporate media, even as they boast of reporting from the quarantined confines of their luxury basement bunkers, certainly seem to care. They have been too well-programmed with the official petty narratives to abandon them just because of a pesky old plague.

"On Tuesday night, the cable news shows kept interrupting their analyses of the primary results for virus updates," Michelle Cottle disingenuously marvels in her own alleged analysis of the death of Bernie's "brand."

My published response to her clueless condescension:

And well-played, New York Times, for the relentless campaign of red-baiting and fear-mongering and marketing of the sexist "Bernie Bro" trope that helped to give us Joe Biden.

Bernie or no Bernie, the revolution from neoliberal predatory capitalism to social democracy is already underway, courtesy of the coronavirus pandemic. Shrill cries from centrists of "but how you gonna pay for that?" are already turning into distant memories.

  The cry for "party unity" is also sounding more grotesque by the minute, given that what we really need is human unity on a scale not seen since who knows when. Biden's latest victories are pyrrhic ones, especially in light of the Democrats refusing to cancel Tuesday's primaries and willfully herding vulnerable older people in large crowds into polling places. Since Biden's victory was all but guaranteed anyway by superdelegates regardless of the once-feared Sanders plurality, the continuing marketing of illusory participatory democracy is both stupid and cruel 

History, if we do have a history, will remember Bernie as a kind man who stuck to his principles and simultaneously and tragically lacked the necessary cutthroat political skills to call out Biden's right-wing career until it was far too late. That is my main beef with Bernie. He put comity over taking the gloves off on behalf of his millions of supporters.

  Lesson learned. Revolution never comes from within a presidential campaign or from elected officials.

On that note, the enforced isolation of the pandemic has not had the desired or expected effect of people crying on their couches as they hope against hope for Biden Party Unity as the panacea against both disease and against Trump.

New York's Upstate-Downstate Housing Alliance, to which I have belonged for the past year, just succeeded in enforcing a statewide moratorium on evictions. That's not good enough, though, so we are now clamoring for a moratorium on all mortgage, rent and utility payments for the duration of the catastrophe. Looming rent strikes and other boycotts of capitalism are what's scaring both sorry sides of our political duopoly into issuing stimulus checks for every American. It's not because they love us. They're perfectly OK if we die, but they're also desperate to win elections and hold on to power.

They will soon get the message that their one or two thousand bucks aren't going to cut it.

I see us going the way of Britain, for hundreds of years one of the most class-based and imperialistic countries on the planet, answering  its physical, emotional and economic post-World War II trauma with the National Health Service.

The unicorns and puppies once so derided by neoliberal naysayers and corporate shills are already dancing in the detritus of this horrific viral pandemic. Medicare For All is coming for those of us lucky enough to survive the last gasp of neoliberlal capitalism.

In the Good Old Hunkertime

Before the CNN Go! app which streamed the Democratic debate got up and went, I managed to watch about half of last night's show. Either Joe Biden was fed massive doses of a secret stimulant drug before airtime, or what we saw was a cyborg standing in for Joe Biden. He utterly failed to meet expectations for one of his epic freeze-ups or terminal meltdowns. Pick your metaphor. Because  Biden actually sounded more coherent than he has in many years.

He sounded especially and chillingly cogent when he echoed the neoliberal talking point that Medicare For All is not the miracle drug we need to tackle the coronavirus pandemic. Look at Italy, he scoffed. They have guaranteed care and people are still dying. What we need is a surge, folks, as in the military. Never mind that the military enjoys its own socialistic health care delivery system.

As far as Bernie was concerned, what a thrill that not once did he utter the dreaded words "Joe is a good friend of mine" during the debate. Although Joe "won" the night simply by sounding minimally and shockingly coherent, Bernie won the night by expressing more empathy for suffering people than Biden has ever been capable of in the whole last half century of his right-wing political career.

With massive lock-downs being ordered by the hour and state primaries being cancelled, it is even becoming doubtful that Biden will have the requisite number of delegates to win the nomination in the traditional way. The other week, I was half-joking when I speculated that the convention will be cancelled and that a small group of elite Democratic officials will nominate Biden or another corporate tool aboard billionaire megadonor Dave Geffen's deep-cleaned jumbo luxury yacht.

And that brings up the general election itself. Although Donald Trump does not have it within his emergency powers to call it off, states themselves could postpone the election if the virus is still raging. By the time November comes around, we may have full-fledged anarchy, or rule by military junta (Biden's "surge") or at best, rule by individual mayors, governors and local councils.

The "future" as a concept has been turned right on its ear. So has the all-American religion of consumerism.

Either wealth begins to be immediately redistributed to ordinary people in the form of a permanent and universal guaranteed income, or ordinary people will begin taking matters into their own hands if they don't first begin succumbing to starvation, chronic maladies, violence, exposure and despair in such record numbers that they will swamp the COVID-19 morbidity and mortality rates.

I hate to clue Uncle Joe in, but we're in the middle of a revolution right now, whether he likes it or not. He can take a return to the glorious Obama years and shove it.

Everybody Is An Exile

Like many of you, I am seesawing between mild concern to barely suppressed panic during the COVID-19 pandemic. As an over-60 person with a few chronic health issues, including intermittent asthma, I am among the millions at increased risk of death if I get sick. So I am self-isolating, and hoping for the best. 

My son and daughter-in-law both have careers that bring them in intimate daily contact with distressed and/or sick people. I especially fear for their safety, because it is just about inevitable that they will be exposed to the virus. Then, best case scenario, they'll have to self-quarantine.

 What is truly scary is that those whose careers are in health and public safety will be out of commission in ever increasing numbers. People increasingly will be completely on their own.

The response at the highest levels of government itself has been nothing short of sickening. The Federal Reserve was lighting-quick to pump a trillion and a half dollars into Wall Street without so much as a "but how you gonna pay for it?" The US Senate, for its part, left town without voting on Nancy Pelosi's dismal House bill offering such a pittance to regular people that it amounts to a slap in the face. Most workers will not in fact qualify for paid sick leave. 

The richest oligarchs and the biggest corporations (read: the political donor class) have been carefully exempted from having to compensate their sick workers and family caregivers. Jeff Bezos will not have to spend one dime of his vast obscene fortune to do right by his Amazon employees.

Just as the banks were deemed too big to fail when the financial system crashed in 2008, corporations are being deemed too big to be humane while enjoying their own human rights under the Citizens United ruling and their socialism-for- the rich handouts.

Meanwhile, the corporate media are covering the government's free virus testing concession as a major victory. But something so radical as actual free medical treatment for sick people?? Not so much. 

But cheer up, proles, because some Internet cable companies have magnanimously pledged not to cut people off from service for 60 days when they lose their income and can't pay the bill .Oh, and Walmart and other retailers have generously offered their parking lots as testing venues. Transportation is on you. Sickness is no excuse not to have skin in the game and abandon your personal responsibility.

So here's the existential dilemma. How are normal people supposed to join together in solidarity and protest when we must isolate ourselves in order to barely keep on existing? As it stands, the Internet is a lifeline absolutely necessary for children to learn and friends and families to communicate. Forget about 60 days of guaranteed service and late fee waivers. The Internet should be permanently declared a public utility, owned and controlled by the public. It shouldn't cost anything.

Predatory capitalism dies so, so hard. 

******************

If you watched Donald Trump's grotesque press conference in the Rose Garden yesterday, and you were already feeling queasy, his performance amid a supporting cast of loathsome disaster profiteers from the retail and drug companies was enough to make you reach for the barf bowl. As proof that late stage capitalism is at its very core profoundly stupid as well as banally evil, the way that the assembled tycoons and sycophants glad-handed each other shows they truly believe that their wealth makes them impervious to what strikes terror into the hearts of mere mortals.

The way that Creepy Veepy Mike Pence paid homage to Trump  and licked his shoes made me fear that he'll come down with hoof and mouth disease along with the Coronavirus that Trump has been exposed to on more than one occasion.

Here's the New York Times comment I wrote on Maureen Dowd's column, "Plagued By the President":

Trump might brag about being untested, but the fact remains that he has been tested and found pitifully and severely wanting - no more so than during this past week.

 If Trump could carry a tune as well as he carries polluted water for his oligarchic cronies, he would have burst into song at the press con which conned nobody, not even the sycophants and Trump rat packers with the dollar signs glittering in their eyes. The aging obese Sinatra wannabe effectively wheezed out "call me irresponsible, call me unreliable, throw in undependable too."

Do his foolish alibis bore us? Uh-huh.

 Do we think he's not too clever, but still adores us? Yes to the first, hell no to the second. He bores us and scares us to death at the same time.

It's undeniably true that he's irresponsibly mad. Not about you, though. He is just plain mad. Not the criminally insane kind, because then we'd have to forgive him for he knows not what he does. It would take until the end of time for all the millions of people he has harmed and continues to harm with his vile words and cruel policies to read out their victim impact statements.

 The bejeweled prosperity gospel charlatans and their GOP cohort peddle their snake oil and lay their hands on Trump and tell us to pray away the plague the same way they told the LGBT community to pray away the gay, But judging from his ever deeper bronzed facial hue, Trump seems to have been self-isolating in the White House tanning bed. Maybe he's trying to burn away the germ.

Love and Greed In the Time of Coronavirus

The tipping point finally arrived on Wednesday. It was the day most people realized that the coronavirus pandemic is not a minor, "this too shall pass" inconvenience, or the kind of economic downturn amenable to the usual massive government bailouts of the rich and the comfortable, and punishments for everyone else.

This time is different. It was only a couple of days ago that the rich were still smugly kvelling that yes indeed, they are different from you and me. That famous observation by F. Scott Fitzgerald and its retort, allegedly by Ernest Hemingway - "yes, they have more money!" - have not been viewed by the Ruling Class Racketeers as either a withering critique or joke. It was both a compliment and a badge of honor.

Even as the new plague was overspreading a woefully unprepared globe, Wall Street erupted with glee last week when Joe Biden crushed Bernie Sanders in Democratic primary elections. On the day after Super Tuesday, predatory insurance companies gained $48 billion in "market value."

Today, that same stock market effectively crashed as Donald Trump unilaterally banned airline travel from Europe to the United States.

If that wasn't bad enough, Hollywood megastar and Democratic Party donor Tom Hanks announced that he and his wife had contracted the coronavirus. Although one may assume that they have excellent private health insurance and a whole team of round the clock doctors and nurses catering to their every health care need, the news that the rich's bodies are not so different from yours and mine - that they are made up of the same immune systems, flesh and bone and tissue - is vying with news of rationed ventilators in Italy and toilet paper shortages everywhere.

The plague suddenly has gotten very real. Everything is being cancelled, from the basketball playoffs to the St. Patrick's Day parade in New York City, which actually threatens to be de-gentrified as the wealthy flee to their country homes and their yachts, much as the nobility fled the cities during the plagues of the Middle Ages.

To call these ripple or even domino effects is a bit bland. Wait until the Amazon fulfillment centers can no longer fulfill. Not only because their underpaid and overworked and uninsured workers get sick, but because the merchandise is no longer being delivered, let alone manufactured.

Maybe then they'll finally start calling it a plague.

As Albert Camus wrote in his famous novel of the same name (La Peste):

"Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise....

"When a war breaks out, people say 'it's too stupid, it can't last long.' But though a war may well be 'too stupid,' that doesn't prevent it lasting. Stupidity has a knack for getting its way, as we should see if we were not so much wrapped up in ourselves."

The current plague will either be the end of globalized neoliberal capitalism, or it will be the toxic engine turning our carceral/surveillance oligarchic system into a full-fledged global totalitarian police state.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump's solution to the catastrophe - besides building both virtual and physical walls to keep the enemy immigrants and germs out - is to bail out his own hotel chain and to offer low interest loans to businesses. He also aims to stealthily destroy the Social Security trust fund by imposing a "temporary" payroll tax holiday.

For their own part, the congressional Democrats are offering insufficient increases in nutrition programs, mandatory sick days and expanded Medicare  for coronavirus, but not for other medical conditions. Think of the deliberately complicated paperwork and stress on an already over-stressed health care system. Think of the deliberate shortage of government bureaucrats necessary to handle the paperwork. "We meant well" will be repeated by the minute.

 To put the paltriness and the downright cynicism in perspective, the $250 million in additional funds they propose for Meals on Wheels tor the vulnerable elderly is less than half the amount that Michael Bloomberg just spent on his aborted presidential run.

Bernie Sanders has one last chance to make a moral case for his agenda when he debates Joe Biden in Arizona in D.C. this weekend. If we don't acknowledge that we're all in this together, we might as well start placing bets on what will kill us first: the coronavirus, or pathological neoliberal capitalism.

******

On to New York Times comments.

Paul Krugman is calling for a permanent stimulus package. Unfortunately, since he aimed his post at what he calls "a very wonky audience" and not normal people, it did not get the prominent placement in the regular opinion section or the audience it deserved. Perhaps if it had contained the requisite Bernie-bashing to accompany its dig at Joe Biden, it would have fared better in the product placement department. This one was a bit of an off-brand outlier, published when the Times was still publishing coronavirus updates next to a weirdly cheerful BP-ish avatar. He writes:

OK, if you’re still with me: I hereby propose that the next U.S. president and Congress move to permanently spend an additional 2 percent of GDP on public investment, broadly defined (infrastructure, for sure, but also things like R&D and child development) — and not pay for it.

Of course, Krugman waited until Bernie had been safely trounced by Biden to espouse what sounds awfully close to the anti-austerian Modern Monetary Theory championed by Sanders's economic adviser Stephanie Kelton and others, and which Krugman has previously derided.

My published comment:

If you're a normal human being reading this post, it makes perfect sense even if you don't understand the wonky charts and math. The message of a more humane and rational way of doing things still comes through.

 Trouble is, the politicians running the place are not normal human beings in that their fealty to the donor class of plutocrats has literally removed them from reality. The only norms they seem to care about are the rhetorical ones that Trump violates each and every day. It's that he is just so darned vulgar about trampling over the poor and working class.

 Never mind just him and a possible President Joe not welcoming Paul Krugman's suggestion for a permanent stimulus. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi invoked the spirit of her guru, the late billionaire austerian Pete Peterson when she successfully restored the "PayGo" rule last year. Only three of her Democratic members (including AOC) dissented from the requirement that all new deficit spending be offset by cuts to other programs. Exceptions would be made for emergencies like pandemics but of course then everything goes back to abnormal as soon as is inhumanely possible.

  You'd think, wouldn't you, that all the critics of single payer health care would finally realize that allowing 80 million people to remain underinsured or lack any coverage all is not only cruel to them but injurious to the economy. The louder the centrists shriek "but how you gonna pay for that" at presidential debates, the more abnormal they sound.

And here's my response to Krugman's subsequent column, on Trump's refusal to acknowledge that a pandemic even exists - all of a piece with the whole history of right-wing denialism. (Of course, the Democrats at least have the grace to admit when a problem exists before not solving it, for which we should be eternally grateful!) His column was written before Trump finally went on TV Wednesday night to struggle through a tortured teleprompter rendering of "if we think it, it will leave."

My published comment:

Not that I wish anybody ill, but you do have to acknowledge the serendipity of Trump being exposed by N degrees of separation to the coronavirus at CPAC. If that's not the height of irony in this age of willful reactionary ignorance, I don't know what is.

 It turns out that Republicans are a lot more fact-based than they want to admit, once they start quarantining their own depraved cowardly selves out of an abundance of self-protective caution and everybody else be damned.

Today it's Ted Cruz in Texas. Dare we hope that tomorrow it might be Trump in Mar-a-Lago? While he's resting up and luxuriating in a tubful of gallons of black market hand sanitizer, he might even be convinced (lulled? terrorized?) to sign legislation sending stimulus checks to every man, woman and child in America - if only as a blatant Hail Mary pass to stimulate his fevered base's enthusiasm for his increasingly fragile reelection campaign.

 But seriously, I can also foresee him cancelling the election entirely due to the state of emergency that he himself has exacerbated by dint of his own criminal narcissism. His pal Rudy Giuliani almost succeeded in cancelling the mayoral election after the 9/11 panic, after all.

As far as the "market" and investor anxiety over the plutonomy is concerned, pardon me if I don't feel as sympathetic as I probably should. If Wall Street finally stops profiting off pollution, wars, and the misery and preventable premature deaths of others - I say tough cookies.

Trump Fears Bernie, Not Biden

With the coronavirus spreading and the economy crashing, Donald Trump is said to be desperate for Joe Biden to hurry up and win the nomination over Bernie Sanders. 

But he is damned if he does get his wish, and he's damned if he doesn't.

First of all, Biden is so far to the right that he might as well be a Republican himself. Trump, who has vowed to cut Social Security and Medicare, will be hard pressed either to pay grudging homage to Biden's own long crusade to cut Social Security and Medicare, or he will forced to publicly defend FDR's New Deal from Biden's depredations. Neither tactic is likely to make him feel comfortable. Then again, he's always bragged that he thinks the avoidance of hypocrisy is for chumps. And it certainly would not be the first time he attacked an opponent from the fake-left. 

A Trump/Biden general election would play out more like the GOP primary which Trump thought he'd avoided as the incumbent president. So unless the campaign devolves into two old reactionaries arm-wrestling or holding push-up contests or trading ornery senile insults on the debate stage, this match-up would be quite the yawn if its only theme is "Corruption V. Corruption."  Turnout also likely would be quite low; the youth vote in particular, which has thus far failed to materialize for Bernie in the vast numbers predicted, would effectively be nonexistent in the general. 

In Michigan, where some of Bernie's poll numbers lag behind Biden's by more than 20 points on the eve of the primary, Biden has already beaten Trump to the punch in 2016 by endorsing, in a $200,000 paid speech, Republican Fred Upton in his ultimately successful congressional run. The Democratic establishment has studiously avoided confronting this inconvenient fact in its own desperate attempt to construct a millimeter of space between the two right-wing reprobates.

  There is no possible way that Trump would ever be able to successfully accuse his fellow racist, sexist, corrupted corporate tool of being a socialist, as he is wont to do with Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the "Opposition."  His supporters are not as stupid as they're made out to be by the liberal press.  The awful, uncomfortable truth is that Trump and Biden are more alike than they're different.

 To achieve the continued enthusiasm and rally turnout of human bodies to which he is accustomed, Trump would much prefer to stick to the tried and true (but false) GOP narrative of the "radical" Democratic Party - to which he himself belonged in the not so distant past. 

It's really hard to accuse Joe Biden of being soft on immigration when activist Latinos heckle him at nearly every event for his own cruel deportation record in the Obama administration. Biden was Obama's xenophobic point man in Latin America, strong-arming leaders in Mexico and elsewhere to keep Central American refugees far, far away from the US border.

So unlike the liberal donor class and the liberal punditocracy, Trump appears not to have written off Bernie Sanders quite yet. Unlike Biden, Bernie has an actual moral leg to stand on when he's standing up to Trump. 

It could be that, unlike the Democratic establishment, Trump pays some actual serious attention to other polls revealing that Bernie has an even better chance of beating him that Biden does.

Trump's America First Action Super PAC is certainly worried enough, or pretending to be worried enough, to have sent out the following S.O.S.  over the weekend:

I'm going to keep this email short and blunt.
We must move quickly before things take a turn for the worse.
Bernie Sanders is building a full-fledged army of socialist grassroots warriors to take down President Trump and Vice President Pence.
It's up to us to put an end to this.
STOP SANDERS - STAND WITH TRUMP!

In other words, despite tweets siding with progressives in accusing the Democrats and the media of slimingBernie, Trump is effectively campaigning for Joe Biden on the very eve of the all-important Michigan primary. Just as Hillary Clinton thought she was cleverly installing Trump in 2016 as the "pied piper" candidate who'd be as easy as pie to beat, so too is Trump going full Machiavellian with the bipartisan red-baiting of Sanders.

He wants Biden and he doesn't want Biden. He wants Bernie to be a foil to Biden and he wants to beat Bernie. In other words, he's trying to gaslight everybody into the desired state of confusion. He is the depraved human iteration of Doctor Doolittle's Pushmipullyu. He not only double-talks, he double-talks from every orifice.

I would also quibble a bit with the survival of the "grassroots socialist army" hinging upon Bernie's own electoral fortunes. The movement now has a life of its own and will notfold in the event that Sanders loses the nomination and fulfills his promise ( cringe-worthily reiterated on the Sunday talk shows) that he will campaign for his "good friend" Biden.

It turns out that the America First Action Super PAC might be even more of a head-fake than it it appears. They weren't asking for dollars - of which they have hundreds of millions aplenty from various corporations and oligarchs - but for a signature on a petition. AFA's founder, Randy Perkins. heads AshBritt Environmental, a disaster/defense contractor. Perkins has been accused by various public interest groups of skirting the law which forbids federal contractors from contributing to political parties. Other AFA contributors include mega-donor Sheldon Adelson as well as some of the shady characters associated with Rudy Giuliani and "Ukrainegate."

My conclusion? They want to beat Bernie to install Joe Biden to get Hunter Biden to get the ultimate Russiagate Revenge against the Democrats. And I also think Trump is afraid of Bernie and is mentally sending the Democratic bigwigs a dozen roses and a magnum of Dom Perignon by way of cheap secret thanks for orchestrating his victories.

Whoever said bipartisanship and triangulation are dead is nuts. 

Correction: whoever said bipartisanship and triangulation are dead forgot to notice that this is a Machiavellian Duopoly, whose oligarchic members must sometimes pretend to hate each other to maintain the increasingly fragile illusion that our elections are free, fair and democratic.

So many head-fakes, so little time. 

And this isn't even counting Hillary Clinton's not so stealthy comeback campaign.

The Aesthetics of Disaster Capitalism

Why does the New York Times's digital masthead graphic of the deadly coronavirus bear such an uncannily perverse resemblance to the BP logo?

New York Times Serene Green Virus

Cheery Major Polluter Logo

If you thought Donald Trump was the only propagandist trying to soft-pedal a major disaster, think again. 

Think back, for example,  to when the Obama administration engaged in its own shameful cover-up of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion for months until underwater footage of gushing oil finally compelled the president to take one of his kids for a quick dip in the Gulf to prove that no disaster is too horrible to abandon our inner Doctor Pangloss.

 Just as BP still tries to portray itself as an environmentally friendly corporate citizen, it seems that the subtle aim of the Times and the ruling class it serves is to quell fears of the deadly virus by painting it in soothing glossy colors. The Gray Lady's pleasant zen-like Mandala is the exact opposite of the microscopic images which more realistically portray Covid-19 as an angry red ball with spikes,or only slightly less alarmingly as a brownish grayish blob festooned with little hairy tentacles.

Scary, Ugly Reality

New York City, the global wealth capital of the world, now threatens to overtake China and Italy as the Covid-19 capital of the world. The governor declared a state of emergency as known cases statewide have spiked to 89 and are exponentially increasing by the day. Since the viral disease is covered by the corporate media as even more of a  deadly threat to Wall Street profits and plutonomic growth than it is to the health of mere mortals, it is incumbent upon the citizens and readers of the Times to panic responsibly. 

Maybe if we meditate upon the Gray Lady's mandala version of a deadly pathogen we will be more apt - if we're in the wealthy minority - to valiantly continue taking in Broadway shows and shopping at Bergdorf-Goodman for the latest in the increasingly rare lines of designer face masks and hand sanitizers.

The Times, liberal science-believing purveyor of propaganda that it is, at least has the decency to place a realistic yet very discreet black border around its mellow yellow/green serene virus illustration. That proves resistance to Donald Trump, who persists in oafishly viewing the pandemic through his terminally cracked rose- colored glasses. His soul brother Rick Santelli even went on TV to suggest that we quickly infect ourselves just to get it over with, as if we were toddlers whose mothers once thought it was as good time as any to expose the kids to chicken pox before they started school to avoid falling behind the rest of the class.

As far as the still-existing, wildly profitable, unaccountable and climate- destroying BP is concerned, it has recently emerged that the effects of the Gulf "spill" are even worse, nearly 10 years later, than we first thought. Satellite imagery had only revealed two thirds of the total damage. In other words, according to a new study, the hundreds of millions of crude extended to a geographical area 30 percent larger than originally reported. 

And the Trump administration continues to drill down both in criminal ignorance and in grossly accelerated off-shore drilling. Unluckily for the current cast of characters occupying the White House, they can't hide sick and dying and dead people as well as the last occupants were able to hide a sick and dying and dead ocean.

Full-0f-Woe Super Wednesday

Look on the bright side, fellow progressives and socialists. Because as far as Joe Biden is concerned, his slew of primary wins hasn't even happened yet. He thinks that they will happen tomorrow, or on what he adorably dubbed Super Thursday. 

Wednesday's children and Sandernistas might be full of woe today, but just wait until tomorrow. Because while the fortune-telling nursery rhyme predicts that Thursday's child has far to go, Biden will only keep demonstrating how disturbingly far gone he truly is.

Godzillionaire Mike Bloomberg has dropped out. But as of this writing, Elizabeth Warren was still in, despite coming in third in her own home state of Massachusetts. Her top-secret Super PAC might soon make her an offer she can't refuse, however, and stop writing the checks that are keeping her campaign on life support. My prediction is that she will drop out and repeat what she did in 2016: refuse to endorse Bernie.

I hope I'm wrong, because in refusing to endorse Bernie she will be destroying her progressive brand and burying what is still left of her political career.

I think the original Democratic Party game plan was to keep Liz in the race all the way to the convention, just to siphon votes away from Sanders. I highly doubt that Barack Obama included her with the other candidates he obviously called after Biden's South Carolina win to make them the charm-offensive offers they couldn't refuse. She can't stand Biden, in particular his authorship of the bankruptcy bill favoring credit card companies and banks and punishing regular people, particularly women.

As Biden continues making what are still too kindly being called "gaffes," the media will get over its Super Tuesday group orgasm soon enough. At least Ronald Reagan had his rote acting skills to mask his own dementia most of the time. 

As far as the "shock" of Biden's wins is concerned, remember that until a few weeks ago, he was the front-runner for the better part of a year. He would have to literally stop campaigning and giving interviews from here to the convention to pull off a Reaganesque head-fake. His failure to even campaign in the states he won has itself been a winning strategy up to now. This is largely because the field was so thinly spread. And likely because enough voters were so spooked by the media's relentless fear-mongering and red-baiting that they pulled the lever for someone they think they know.

Now that it's just him and Bernie, Biden can no longer hide while he runs. For its own part, the Democratic Party is so bankrupt that it has made Joe its sacrificial lamb at the altar of the Trump Temple, just to keep an FDR-style liberal like Sanders out of the White House. 

When you think about it, this is really a form of elder abuse by the party leadership. It doesn't matter that Biden's vice president would be the real heir or heiress apparent for 2024 and probably already running things the minute Uncle Joe stumbles through the Oath of Office, should he miraculously beat Trump.

If the rumors are true and Biden names Stacey Abrams his running mate before the nomination, then Sanders will be free to follow suit and prematurely join forces with a firebrand like Nina Turner. 

Thankfully, Bernie did not mention that "Joe is a good friend of mine" in a speech to supporters on Tuesday night. But he did seem compelled to add that "Joe is a decent guy" before noting his vote for the Iraq War, his support for job-destroying trade deals and his career-long crusade to cut Medicare and Social Security. If that's decency, then I don't know what Bernie's definition of pathological cruelty is.

Stay tuned.