The Elite Response to Catastrophe: Beat, Prey, Shove

With piles of furniture on curb-sides becoming a common sight all over the country as evictions ramp up because tens of millions of people have no jobs and no money to pay the rent, former First Lady Michelle Obama went on Instagram over the weekend to show her empathy with the exploding American underclass.

She posted a picture of herself lounging barefoot on an overstuffed sofa she'd transported all the way up to the rooftop terrace of her Washington, DC mansion. It was a way not only of demonstrating solidarity with all those losing the very roofs over their own heads, but of reassuring her millions of concerned fans not to worry about her and the self-diagnosed "low level depression" brought on by the pandemic lockdown. She is doing just fine compared to the "folks" out there working for "the rest of us."

Her self-righteous motto "When they go low, we go high," has been duly augmented by "When I feel low, I go high. And so can you!"

So, proles, stop feeling so down and out just because you're down, and literally out on the street. You, too, can live the elite al fresco lifestyle and perhaps even take up Michelle Obama's therapeutic bullet-journaling hobby on your very own outdoor sofa as you wait for the movers to take your earthly possessions to the auction block or the junkyard.

 If you're especially feeling low, and a rooftop terrace or Martha's Vineyard escape is not available at the moment, then you could opt to do what record numbers of your fellow Down and Outs awaiting their "deaths of despair" started doing long before Covid-19 ever hit the scene. You can go high on drugs and alcohol.

Of course, the Down and Out population is not really the intended audience to whom Michelle Obama has so magnanimously written:

There’s no reason to worry about me. Like I said in that conversation with @Michele__Norris, I’m thinking about the folks out there risking themselves for the rest of us—the doctors and nurses and essential workers of all kinds, I’m thinking about the teachers and students and parents who are just trying to figure out school for the fall. I’m thinking about the people out there protesting and organizing for a little more justice in our country."

If her idea of "a little more justice in our country" does not explicitly include a rent freeze, an eviction/foreclosure moratorium and legislation for the construction of tens of millions of new affordable housing units, it is likely because Michelle's husband had deliberately chosen not to include such relief on his own agenda during his eight years as president. The Obama administration's conscious choice to allow banks to throw millions of people out of their homes after the 2008 financial meltdown actually helped set the stage for the current catastrophe. "Folks" have never recovered from the first eviction/foreclosure crisis of more than a decade ago. Fully 94 percent of all the wealth "lost" as a result of Wall Street's greed-fueled housing bubble and subsequent bursting geysered up to the richest one percent of Americans - Michelle Obama's class, or what she seems to mean by "the rest of us."

As Binyamin Applebaum writes in a New York Times editorial:

The government dismissed the woes of homeowners and renters as personal tragedies that did not require the attention of the Treasury Department. The government was wrong. The millions of individual tragedies required action. A nation is a collection of people; the first job of government is to keep people from harm.

 Even on its own terms, the government’s indifference was a mistake. The massive dislocations shredded communities, as families were replaced by abandoned homes. Schools struggled to help displaced children, whose test scores declined and behavioral problems increased. Businesses lost their customers. Cities starved for property tax revenue slashed spending: Colorado Springs turned off one-third of its street lights.

 The accumulation of individual tragedies left lasting scars on the economy and on society.

Applebaum is being unnecessarily kind when he calls the manufactured cruelty of the Obama years - itself a manufactured prelude to the Trump years  - a "mistake." Crime against humanity, or at least depraved indifference to human life, would be a more apt description.

There is plenty of tone-deafness afflicting the elite circles basking at the level of Michelle Obama's rooftop terrace, of course. 

Donald Trump's own executive order halting evictions is no such thing. The language merely promises to "consider" some sort of eviction relief.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's idea of "a little justice" in the deliberate absence of any congressional relief for regular people was to do Michelle Obama's Instagram post one better, and post a prayer for "responsive justice." The gist of the sanctimonious plea to her Democratic caucus is to pray "even harder" for the GOP sadists than they pray for their unseen and forgotten constituents.

If prayers by Democratic politicians do not miraculously provide food, clothing and shelter for millions of hungry and evicted Americans, then their oligarchic task-masters have offered to vaguely think about helping the exploding Down and Out population themselves, sometime within the next 10 years or so.  

"A new non-profit, the New York Jobs CEO Council, will work with universities, the city and other groups to create new curriculums (sic) and apprenticeships over the next decade," announces the New York Times.

The pledge to prepare 100,000 Down and Outs for the jobs of the future was signed by more than two dozen of the wealthiest tax-averse corporations and oligarchs:

Details are scant, but the initiative has attracted the support of many of the most powerful chief executives in the country, including Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Laurence D. Fink of BlackRock, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Sundar Pichai of Google.

 “We started with the C.E.O.s for a very specific reason,” said Gail O. Mellow, who will run the new council and most recently served as president of LaGuardia Community College. “We wanted that buy in.”

Of course, some of the same Wall Street and corporate predators who evicted millions of people after the first financial crisis and bought up the foreclosed properties with a vengeance, only to begin evicting millions of people anew during the pandemic, now again try to present themselves as their victims' saviors.

There is seemingly no limit to how low they'll go for their endless high profits.

As we brace ourselves for next week's Democratic Convention, and speeches by the Obamas and Clintons and Nancy Pelosi, the Times assures us that while the hearts (sic) of Wall Streeters aren't necessarily with Joe Biden, their wallets most assuredly are.

It helps, the article states,  that he's been historically viewed as a "distressed asset" which can be bought low.

They also think that marginalized, jobless, evicted, perennially exploited people can be bought low and brought even lower. 

Is there no pain that these prayerful predators will not try to commodify and consume?

One consolation, as more and more commodified humans protest on the streets (for a whole lot more than "a little justice") is that the ruling elites are displaying their arrogance and ignorance and cluelessness in ever more entertaining and inspiring ways with every passing day. 

Their very existence is a clarion call to action for us to get off our curbside sofas. Our furniture and worldly possessions might disappear, but we cannot and we must not. We must refuse to be part of their planned development, their commodified human refuse dump. 

Happy Birthday, Saint Barack of Hiroshima

Since Tropical Storm Isaias knocked me off the grid for the past three days, I'd missed the national corporate media's fawning frenzy over Barack Obama's 59th birthday as well as its much more subdued coverage of the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by the United States.

Therefore, submitted for your approval (just like the old Twilight Zone DVDs I've been watching all week to ease my Internet withdrawal symptoms) is a piece I wrote called "Saint Barack of Hiroshima." (Original air date May 28, 2016):

Not only is Barack Obama one of the most ironic Nobel Peace laureates in history, he also takes the prize for being the most cynically arrogant. Nobody with even a fraction of his obvious intelligence, nobody with even the mere rotting vestige of a moral compass, would have dared to set foot in Hiroshima otherwise.

Grotesquely parading down a hideously symbolic red carpet, Obama proceeded to plant himself comfortably behind yet another global bully pulpit, announcing once again, in case we forgot, that the United States will continue to reign as the concern-trolling bully and moral arbiter of the planet.

How easily we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause.  Every great religion promises a pathway to love and peace and righteousness, and yet no religion has been spared from believers who have claimed their faith as a license to kill.  Nations arise, telling a story that binds people together in sacrifice and cooperation, allowing for remarkable feats, but those same stories have so often been used to oppress and dehumanize those who are different.

Obama himself has conveniently used religion as his own license to kill. Four years ago, concerned about his own reelection prospects and deeming himself in dire need of some bellicose propaganda to counter the GOP's silly accusations of deficient virility, he planted a story in the New York Times about his Terror Tuesday Kill List.  The tortured narrative of the article sought to portray him as a thoughtful Archangel of Death, a Saint Michael in heaven with a halo, as opposed to stupid Lucifer with a Bushy face burning in the hellish flames of merely mortal ignorance.

Not being a particularly religious man himself, Obama relied on the Roman Catholic faith of his national security mentor and future CIA director to justify his assassination program, which to date has resulted in the deaths of thousands of people.

Beside the president at every step is his counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, who is variously compared by colleagues to a dogged police detective, tracking terrorists from his cavelike office in the White House basement, or a priest whose blessing has become indispensable to Mr. Obama, echoing the president’s attempt to apply the “just war” theories of Christian philosophers to a brutal modern conflict.

 (snip)

The nominations go to the White House, where by his own insistence and guided by Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama must approve any name. He signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan — about a third of the total.

Aides say Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed in lethal counterterrorism operations. A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions. And he knows that bad strikes can tarnish America’s image and derail diplomacy.

 How easily Saint Barack learned to justify his violence to the name of some higher cause. Transcending the mindless fundamentalism of the bloodthirsty despots of wars past, our intellectual president uses the New York Times as his own enhanced propaganda Bible, even getting the scribes to elevate his chamber of death to a Platonic man cave of advanced ideas.  After all, were it not for the pragmatic Greek philosophers, there never would have been any Christian intellectuals to justify the whole gamut of depravity, from misogyny, to imperialism and plunder, to inquisitorial torture and death, to pedophilia.

Since many of the thousands of Obama's drone victims have been residents of "tribal" areas, how much easier for him to justify their deaths. They are stateless people, belonging to no nation. Since they have no protection from any formal government, they are thus dehumanized, rendered into nameless "bug-splat" by American Predator and Reaper drones. 

But Obama apparently succeeded PR-wise in Hiroshima, adding his own glib chapter to what he only pretends to decry: "Nations arise, telling a story that binds people together in sacrifice and cooperation, allowing for remarkable feats, but those same stories have so often been used to oppress and dehumanize those who are different."

While he has been rightly castigated by scientists and independent critics for presuming to lecture the world on nuclear weapons after appropriating an obscene trillion dollars to upgrade America's own arsenal, his speech itself got relatively glowing reviews from the liberal press, anxious to defend him against silly GOP accusations that he went to Hiroshima to apologize for America's dropping the atomic bombs. That is so patently unfair.  Obama not only didn't apologize, he deliberately thumbed his nose at Nagasaki, an even more depraved war crime given that the war was over by the time Truman committed his two-fer.

Obama even bent over backward to avoid directly mentioning that the United States actually dropped the bombs. His opening salvo in the alleged U.S. rapprochement with Japanese survivors was, in fact, stunningly maudlin and insulting to the victims:

Seventy-one years ago, on a bright, cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed.  A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.  

Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima?  We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not so distant past.  We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 in Japanese men, women and children; thousands of Koreans; a dozen Americans held prisoner.  Their souls speak to us. They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and what we might become.

To hear Obama tell it, death just sort of fell down from the sky like an act of an Old Testament God, in burning little radioactive isotopes instead of raindrops. No input needed from Harry Truman or even from the unrepentant pilot of the Enola Gay, who named his bomb "Little Boy." See, Obama just could not bring himself to admit that the United States destroyed Hiroshima. Rather, a Biblical wall of fire and a flash of light did the trick, in order to demonstrate that "mankind" still possesses the means to go all retro Adam and Eve, and destroy itself.

 The victims of the war crimes should ask for nothing more than for Saint Barack to examine the consciences of both the warmongers and the innocent bystanders. Then he will order up some absolution and even co-opt Bernie Sanders in calling for a "moral" (not an anti-capitalist) revolution. Why else is his name Barack, which literally means Blessed?  All of us must have some skin in this depraved game, utter our acts of contrition even as the Church of Capitalism itself is exempt. He wants the world congregation to believe that all wars are started by popular referendum rather than by plutocratic priests lounging in a corner sacristy, guarded by men with guns and shielded by their billions of dollars in excess, tax-free profits.

And lest we forget, Obama's Hiroshima bucket list of a visit was a mere sidelight to the real purpose of his Asia trip: a sales junket to cement support for the corporate coup known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It's been called NAFTA on steroids. Maybe we should also call it the A-Bomb of all treaties, given that it blows up democracy in favor of a global oligarchy. 

But the New York Times cloyingly and dutifully described the prime photo-op ("Hiroshima Survivor Cries, and Obama Gives Him a Hug") And then it was on to the stoic panoramic spectacle of the official kiss and makeup session between just two elite guys:

 Mr. Obama’s visit to Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park had all the pomp, ceremony and planned choreography of a state visit or a leader’s funeral. With thousands in attendance and much of Japan watching on TV, Mr. Obama walked forward alone at the park and laid a wreath on a white pyramid. He paused before the memorial’s cenotaph, his head bowed.

 A moment later, Mr. Abe approached with his own wreath, which he laid beside Mr. Obama’s on another pyramid. After a moment’s reflection, the two leaders shook hands — a clear signal of the extraordinary alliance their two nations had forged out of the ashes of war.

It's a pyramid scheme, all right. Substitute "wealth" for "wreath" for what goes on the tippy-top, and you can almost envision a veritable TPP Ballet, maybe staged as a hawkish update of the Firebird. Out of the smoldering ashes of war comes the renewed conflagration of capitalism on crack.

The Malthusian States of America

With 20 million Americans' incomes plummeting by as much as two-thirds literally overnight with the expiration of federal unemployment benefits, and 40 million of us facing eviction in the coming months because we lack the money to pay the rent, and with a pandemic raging all around us, comparisons to such catastrophes as the Great Depression simply fail to suffice.

This is especially true because our government, ostensibly formed to protect the citizens, is now openly run by a cabal of corporate predators using "democratically" elected politicians as their front-men and front-women. We are, in effect, not so much a nation or a republic as we are a colony.

A more apt historical comparison to the present crisis might be 19th century Ireland, where mass famine was the de facto pandemic of the era.

Ireland, a British colony, suffered from extreme inequality. Most property was owned by absentee landlords. When the famine arrived in 1845, nearly a million people died and some eight million more were forced to emigrate. British elites simply delighted in the situation, much as Wall Street investors are delighting in Malthusian population control, via Covid-19. The soaring stock market indicates the euphoria of the elites every single day. The more people who die in service to the rich, the more their homes become vacant, the more that the profits of the wealthy few can soar into the stratosphere. Jeff Bezos notoriously glommed up an extra $13 billion in just one 24-hour period and promises to become America's first trillionaire once the dystopian dust finally settles - with or without survivors, with or without a superfluous exploited labor force.

What other conclusion can we reach than to acknowledge that our ruling elites are deliberately making a horrendous situation even worse? What is different in 21st century America from what the British lords intended for Ireland nearly 200 years ago?

As economist Thomas Piketty writes in "Capital and Ideology," those elites demonstrated the "quasi-explicit Malthusian goal of reducing the number of the poor and the number of rebels to boot."

That the elimination of the poor through Social Darwinism is the explicit goal of the "bad cop," or Republican, side of the ruling duopoly is a given. Donald Trump's  goal of eliminating protesters by sending Homeland Security forces to Portland to roust them has initially failed, largely because he went about it in his usual oafish incompetent manner. The "good cops" of the oligarchic duopoly have therefore been temporarily forced to withhold their usual rubber stamp approval of funding for Homeland Security, to try and keep up the pretense that we do not live in a police state. At the same time, they are adamantly supporting continued militarization of local police forces.

If the Democrats had any actual political will or interest in serving the mass of constituents who are not members of the donor class of task masters, their national political platform would contain a guaranteed national income, guaranteed housing and guaranteed single payer health care.

None of these things was on Franklin Roosevelt's vaguely worded "Forgotten Man" 1932 platform, either. He and the political class of the Great Depression had to be scared into passing initial New Deal legislation by socialist rabble- rousers and unions and rent strikers.

Even with this modicum of relief, as Frances Fox Piven notes, the protests continued. 

"They were crucial in pressuring reluctant state and local officials to implement the federally initiated aid programs... By the mid-1930s, mass strikes were a threat to economic recovery and to the Democratic voting majorities that had put FDR in office. A pro-union labor policy was far from Roosevelt's mind when he took office in 1933. But by 1935, strikes escalating and the election of 1936 approaching, he was ready to sign the National Labor Relations Act."

This bowing to popular demand followed a pattern. A similar thing had happened in famine-stressed Ireland, where rural tenants refused to pay rent, occupied the property they'd been ordered to vacate, and fought back against police and the landlords' private militias. The Gladstone government, duly frightened, finally passed the first Irish Land Act in 1870.

It turned out that when push came to shove, the sacred right of private property was not quite as sacrosanct as the owning class liked to pretend. The rationale, Piketty writes, was then and still is now, that if the elites give the poor too much relief and and too many rights, society itself might collapse. But eventually, the British elites relented -much as FDR's party relented in the 1930s - not so much because they'd suddenly developed any empathy for the poor, but because they were scared for their own hides.

Only when they realized that the poor simply weren't buying into their elite propaganda of imminent societal collapse from too much fairness (for the simple fact that the poor had nothing left to lose) did the Lords change their tune in a big fat hurry. They knew that unless they agreed to some reappropriation of wealth, a true bottom-up revolution threatened to become a reality. Their world would be the one to collapse.

In the case of Ireland, tenants were allocated their own land, and landlords were compensated by the government, temporarily placating the masses of people. In the case of the United States, cash relief and a jobs guarantee and retirement security were enacted. In the case of both, elites have been chipping away at these reforms ever since.

Democratic challenger Joe Biden's vow to "Build Back Better" is, without any real economic relief, nothing but a vague promise to build upon a foundation of neoliberal quicksand. Because he is no Barack Obama, who was so charmingly adept at fooling most liberals most of the time with his glib doublespeak of hope and change and "winning the future" by "sharing the sacrifice" with billionaires, it's an absolute given that the street protests will continue unabated all across America, even with a Democratic restoration.

Because Trump defeat or no Trump defeat, we will still be living in a failed state come Inauguration Day, 2021. The social contract will still have been broken into a thousand little pieces. As legal scholar Rosa Brooks has written of failing states, America still will have  lost "control over the means of violence," unable to create peace and stability for its citizens, unwilling to ensure economic growth through a more equitable redistribution of social goods, and still ruled by the "violent competition for resources."

Biden's selection of a Black woman as his vice president will not achieve the oligarchic goal of quelling dissent through identity politics. One top contender,Kamala Harris, is a former prosecutor who jailed the poor mothers of truant children and exploited prison labor, even under a court order to stop doing it. Another, former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice, is an architect of the Libyan regime change war, resulting in a modern-day slavery system in that particular fail-by-design state. The least-bad choice, Karen Bass, once advocated Medicare For All before orchestrating the congressional Kinte Cloth stunt in lieu of giving health care to everybody. She also just "walked back" her kind words about Fidel Castro in hopes of increasing her veep chances.

But the pendulum is swinging back in our direction. Perhaps we can convince - as in, scare shitless - a Biden administration into commandeering vast parcels of vacant oligarchic real estate and transforming it into affordable housing. The owners and landlords and donors comprising his base would, of course,  be fully and fairly compensated, just as they once were in Ireland, Uncle Joe's beloved ancestral home.

We've got to take advantage of the pendulum-swinging while the pendulum-swinging's still good. It happens so rarely in the favor of the have-not majority.

Bring Out Your Canceled Dead

Two more iconic American corpses have bitten the dust this week. Environmentalist John Muir, father of the national park system and founder of the Sierra Club, and  Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, are the latest high-profile casualties of the Cancel Culture Craze that is sweeping the nation as virulently as Covid-19.

The Sierra Club officially disowned Muir because he was a racist prone to uttering the N word. Planned Parenthood of New York is removing Sanger's name from its clinic because she was an avowed eugenicist who was also notorious for canoodling with the KKK back in the day.

The Cancel Culture Club (CCC) has more than one criterion for membership.

President Woodrow Wilson, for example, was canceled earlier this summer because he was both a racist who uttered the N word and a eugenicist who wanted to cull Blacks, Browns, Asians, Poor White Trash and just about everyone that his entitled class deemed unworthy of inclusion in American society. The recent wokeness by Princeton University regarding its erstwhile hero makes Joe Biden's  own recent claim that Donald Trump is the first racist president all the more baffling.

"The way he deals with people based on the colour of their skin, their national origin, where they’re from, is absolutely sickening,” the former vice president said. “No sitting president has ever done this. Never, never, never. No Republican president has done this. No Democratic president. We’ve had racists, and they’ve existed. They’ve tried to get elected president. He’s the first one that has.”

Given his authorship of the Crime Bill, which has jailed Black people so disproportionately as to cause their incarceration numbers to exceed the number of slaves prior to the Civil War, and given his friendship with such white supremacist politicians as Jesse Helms and James Eastland, you almost wonder whether Biden is miffed because Trump demotes him to a sloppy second in the racist presidential sweepstakes.

To be fair, though, Biden is likely just being his same old befuddled self. But it is certainly strange that the establishment media is not questioning Biden's cognitive status as vociferously as it is hounding Trump over his.  What president hasn't been racist? Even FDR made a deal with Southern Democrats to bar Black workers from the Social Security program in order to get it passed in Congress. Even Barack Obama, our first Black president, referred to Black protesters reacting to the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore as "thugs" as he passive-aggressively oversaw the worsening of the economic plights of Black communities during his eight-year stay in the White House. This doesn't even factor in the de facto racism of record deportations and droning dark-skinned people to death in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia and other "tribal" areas. Come on, man.

Donald Trump, for his own part, reacted to Biden's racism accusations in his usual modest fashion:

“I’ve done more for Black Americans than anybody with the possible of exception of Abraham Lincoln. Nobody has even been close.”

Abe Lincoln, for his own part, was also reputed to regularly utter the N word in conversation. He also seriously considered deporting newly freed slaves back to Africa or relocating them to a special colony in Panama, telling a quintet of Black leaders he invited to the White House just before his death that he believed "the African race suffered greatly by living among us, while ours suffers from your presence." 

Well, at least he didn't use the term "shithole countries" as Trump so racistly did.

Conservative and liberal pundit-apologists alike love to make excuses for their beloved figures whenever they're caught behaving or talking badly, whether pre- or postmortem: "It's complicated." Or its close relative: "It was a different time."

But back to Margaret Sanger. Historian Edwin Black writes in "War Against the Weak" that Planned Parenthood has always been open about her history in the eugenics movement, which swept the nation in the early 20th more virulently than Cancel Culture is in the 21st. It was only when Nazi Germany co-opted its pseudo-scientific cant and exterminated six million Jews that  the "progressive" eugenicists of the USA decided that it was probably best to shut up about culling undesirables.

When the pre-woke New York Times reviewed Black's book in 2003, though, it was dismissive of his "muckraking" on the rich and powerful proponents of the eugenics movement. Even though the Rockefeller Foundation funded three eugenics laboratories in Nazi Germany, reviewer Daniel Kevles wrote, it was unfair to claim that Hitler was inspired by such well-meaning American plutocrats, who really, really hated Nazism. Plus, it is patently unfair to single out the wealthy in the U.S. as the only ones desirous of a master race. The middle class was fully on board with eugenics, too. It was the zeitgeist, stupid! Mistakes were made. They meant well. Nobody could ever have predicted....

Meet the new Zeitgeist, a/k/a Cancel Culture, during the reign of President Hitler Trump.

So I'm curious. If you're going to cancel Margaret Sanger, then shouldn't you also cancel Andrew Carnegie, whose vast fortune provided the seed money for the Cold Spring Harbor eugenics research laboratory on Long Island? You might want to change the name of Carnegie Hall, Carnegie-Mellon University, the Carnegie Art Museum, and the Carnegie Foundation for Peace (Since the latter is a think tank funded by the "defense" industry for purposes of never-ending war and surveillance, its disbandment might not be such a bad idea.)

The aforementioned Rockefellers were also gung-ho eugenicists. Does that mean that we should change the name of Rockefeller Center and cancel the continued streaming of 30 Rock reruns, and boycott NBC? (again, not a bad idea, given that its executives reportedly are keeping The Apprentice  outtakes of Donald Trump uttering the N word under lock and key.)

To prove their sincerity, the newly woke should cancel Nazi sympathizer Henry Ford by changing the name of his iconic car company right this very minute. But why stop there? Then we should get rid of Ford's overpaid CEO and investors, and let the workers take over ownership and production - once there's a vaccine, that is.

 Above all, we should cancel the whole idea of forcing people to go back to work before it is safe for them to do so. 

It has now reached the farcical point that the mere questioning of Cancel Culture will get you canceled.

Writers are so afraid of being called racist or misogynistic that they're shutting up and self-censoring to avoid giving offense and possibly losing their livelihoods along with their reputations. There is a distinct McCarthyesque stench to the self-righteous Cancel Culture Club.

Just as the original McCarthy era architects destroyed the New Deal and solidified social and economic inequalities by inventing the Communist threat, so too are a new generation of reactionary neoliberals and neocons engaging in Virtue Signalling Gone Wild as the whole capitalistic framework of oppression and legalized corruption collapses around them - a collapse hastened by Covid-19. Against all reason, the Cancelers are of the same breed (sorry, eugenicists!) as those promulgating the various manifestations of Russiagate. They need to constantly manufacture outside enemies to hide the fact that they are the enemy.

The hard right side of the ruling oligarchy, exemplified by Trump, decries the tearing down of  Confederate statues and the disrespect shown by "terroristic" citizens of their militarized domestic police forces. The centrist, or soft-right, side, exemplified by Joe Biden's corporate Democrats and Lincoln Project Republicans, points the finger of racism at Trump while they themselves tacitly reinforce endemic racism through, among other things, refusing to entertain any discussion of Medicare For All during a pandemic which is disproportionately killing Black and Brown people. They reinforce global racism by giving Trump even more money that he wants or needs in order to continue oppressing and assaulting people both at home and abroad with tear gas, bombs, drones, and mob-style looting and intimidation.

With any luck, and with a lot of help from the activists and rabble rousers now out on the streets, the bickering oligarchs will cancel each other out before Covid-19 and climate change cancel out the rest of humanity.

Donald Trump's Death Wish

No, he doesn't want to literally die, despite months of going maskless in public and a whole sedentary lifetime's worth of poor eating habits. Trump reminds me of a reanimated Megatherium, the giant bipedal ground sloth the size of an elephant that plodded the earth for more than a million years mindlessly gobbling up whole forests before it was finally hunted to extinction by the smarter, smaller animals known as humans. Trump the sloth has become woke enough to lumber forth from his Coronavirus hibernation cave to deflect the blame for the country's collapse in some new directions - as in, Portland, Oregon and maybe even a city near you.

 At the rate we're going, Homo sapiens will lucky to survive as earth's dominant species for even one more decade. And for everybody regretting how old they're getting and how they won't be around to see how it all ends, please do not give up hope yet. Try to hang on just a bit longer.

Donald Trump, for his own clumsy part, is  grasping at straws in an orgy of hope for his own political survival. Perhaps experiencing a primordial genetic memory of the Pleistocene's mass extinction event, our MAGA-therium president has taken to playing Charles Bronson in the 1974 mega-hit Death Wish. In Trump's mind, the cinematic thugs and muggers of the 70s are disguised as peaceful protesters demonstrating against police brutality and other capitalistic depredations, like evictions and starvation wages.

Bronson had portrayed Paul Kersey, an architect who goes on a revenge nationwide killing spree after his wife is murdered and his daughter raped by a trio of home invaders. The film roughly coincided with Trump's own rise to power in a near-bankrupt New York City, which was experiencing its own crime wave at the time. As chronicled in the book "Fear City," it was Wall Street's bond vigilantes who at the dawn of the neoliberal era, led the charge for cuts to social programs, public services and the destruction of labor unions. The corrupt New York political machine welcomed Trump, the brash young tycoon, with open arms because of his magnetic power to draw other movers and shakers to the Big Apple and to make all that creative destruction such good, grisly tabloid fun.

His niece Mary Trump writes of the media's essential role in exploiting Trumpism in "Too Much And Never Enough":

"In the 1970s, after my grandfather had already been preferring and promoting Donald for years, the New York media picked up the baton and began disseminating Donald's unsubstantiated hype. In the 1980s, the banks joined in when they began to fund his ventures. Their willingness (and then their need) to foster his increasingly unfounded claims to success hung on their hopes of recouping their losses."

The exploitative Death Wish vigilante film was a blockbuster nationwide hit, grossing more than $20 million for its producers and distributors, and spawning eight sequels as well as a more blatantly racist, alt-right 2018 remake starring Bruce Willis - who bears a startling resemblance to Trump himself on the DVD cover:

 Vincent Canby's New York Times review of the original movie was scathing:

(Director)Paul Kersey describes his actions in the film as “the good old American custom of self‐defense” (as once practiced against the Indians?) and the movie clearly agrees. In other words, there's nothing wrong with this country today that giving guns to all the right people wouldn't cure. Who are the right people? White middle‐class maniacs. For anyone with two brain cells to rub together that might be a tough question, but not for “Death Wish.”...

 It was, however, a stroke of genius to cast Charles Bronson in the unlikely role of an upper middle‐class New York liberal who sees the light. Almost any other actor I can think of would probably look very sheepish under the circumstances. Not Bronson, who seems no more capable of intellectual activity than a very old, very tired circus bear. It's enough that he is able to walk around on his hind legs and occasionally, shoot a gun.

Trump is certainly no Charles Bronson. Despite his resemblance to a tired old circus bear (or an extinct circus Megatherium) our aged sloth-president is cravenly proxifying his vigilantism by sending camouflaged Border Patrol/ICE thugs to Portland (and later maybe to Detroit, Chicago and New York City) in his stead, to kidnap citizens off the streets when not actually assaulting them with deadly weapons.

Since the 1974 film resonated so strongly with the white suburban audience  that Trump relies upon to win re-election, he perhaps hopes that the paranoid American mindset has not gone completely extinct in this New Age of Wokeness. Maybe he can make liberals see the light after all. Because, how fast can human beings really evolve from fear and loathing of The Other into solidarity utopia?

Canby's Death Wish review can be read as a preternatural forecast of the Trump White House itself:

It's a tackily made melodrama but it so cannily orchestrates the audience's responses that it can appeal to law‐and‐order fanatics, sadists, muggers, club women, fathers, older sisters, masochists, policemen, politicians, and, it seems, a number of film critics. Impartially. Its message, simply put, is: KILL. TRY IT. YOU'LL LIKE IT.

Donald Trump thus tackily invited the courtier establishment media into his inner sanctum to offer his own self-review of the Remake, the Sequel, the never-ending nostalgia for the 70s and bleeding heart liberalism turned on its head:

“I’m going to do something — that, I can tell you,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “Because we’re not going to let New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and Baltimore and all of these — Oakland is a mess. We’re not going to let this happen in our country. All run by liberal Democrats.”

 The president portrayed the nation’s cities as out of control. “Look at what’s going on — all run by Democrats, all run by very liberal Democrats. All run, really, by radical left,” Mr. Trump said. He added: “If Biden got in, that would be true for the country. The whole country would go to hell. And we’re not going to let it go to hell.”

That, of course, is being unfair to Joe Biden, who for most of his adult life has acted out his own inner Charles Bronson to Oscar-worthy perfection. He arrived in the U.S. Senate in 1973, just before that the influential Death Wish movie was released to packed audiences throughout the country. His Bronsonian zeitgest has lasted through all eight sequels and all of the nearly 50 years of his political career. His 1993 Senate floor rant promoting the crime bill even included Hollywood imagery of "My wife, my daughter" being victimized by sociopathic predators.

With Biden's history of attacking Republicans from the right on their law and order bona fides, you can sort of understand Trump's recent one-upmanship, both in words and terrifying authoritarian actions.

As the New York Times reported last year (when the bumbling Biden's chances for the nomination seemed tenuous):

In 1989, with the violent crime rate continuing to rise as it had since the 1970s, Mr. Biden lamented that the Republican president, George H. W. Bush, was not doing enough to put “violent thugs” in prison. In 1993, he warned of “predators on our streets.” And in a 1994 Senate floor speech, he likened himself to another Republican president: “Every time Richard Nixon, when he was running in 1972, would say, ‘Law and order,’ the Democratic match or response was, ‘Law and order with justice’ — whatever that meant. And I would say, ‘Lock the S.O.B.s up.’”

Fast forward to 2020, and Biden boasts that he has narrowed his vice presidential beauty contest to four lucky Black finalists as he fights to end "systemic racism." He lumps Black women into one monolithic group that has "supported me my entire political career. I've been loyal to them and they've been loyal to me."

No wonder that MAGA-therian Man, under constant siege for hiding behind his own harem of work-wives and for demanding and getting loyalty from his sycophantic underlings, is going nuts. His remaining brain cells must be rubbing themselves together into a frenzy.

I Am Being Treated So Unfairly!

As is usual during these internecine oligarchic battles, the average Joes and Janes of Exceptional America end up being the collateral damage as we await the extinction of the corrupt two-party system and fight against our assigned status as aliens in our own land.

Democratic Health Care Plan Is a Gift to Predatory Insurers

There's an old saying in vampire lore that if you don't want to get bitten, then don't let the bloodsuckers in.

The Democrats just invited another vampire in.

 The "task force" created by presumptive nominee Joe Biden and his good friend Bernie Sanders in order to coat the party's corporate agenda with that all-important "unity gloss" has just released its aspirational agenda to much media fanfare.

"It's the clearest sign yet that the moderate and progressive wings of the Democratic Party are trying to unite far more than they did in 2016," gushed the New York Times article lauding the "six takeaways" that prove beyond any doubt that progressives are the big winners of some very tasty crumbs and should be properly bedazzled by comity in high places.

This narrative is being spun despite the fact that Medicare For All has officially been declared D.O.A. right in the middle of the pandemic.  Even if the Democrats achieve another super-majority in 2021, the best of all possible worlds will stop at a public option, lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 60, and maybe throwing in some dental and hearing aid coverage for the lucky winners.

The Task Force's answer to the abjectly failed United States policy of tying people's health insurance to their employment is to raise US health care costs to astronomical new levels by subsidizing the private insurance policies of the tens of millions of workers thrown out of their jobs by Covid-19. The insurance companies, which have already posted record profits this year because people are too afraid of catching the virus to seek medical care, and because hospitals have cancelled elective surgeries and other costly procedures, stand to become even richer during a Biden administration.

Now, about the Dems inviting the vampire in. Covered by the usual dark cloak of subterfuge, the blood-sucking anti-Single Payer insurance lobby managed to get its own seat at the Task Force's health policy table - which, just like a spider, is comprised of eight members.

The invitee was one Chris Jennings, a fellow of the corporate think tank ominously known as the Bipartisan Policy Center.  BPP's current head honcho and co-founder is notorious insurance industry lobbyist Tom Daschle. Jennings, a veteran of the both the Clinton and Obama administrations, also runs his own boutique consulting firm which advises for-profit health care systems and their various "stakeholders."

If the Dems have anything to say about it, these ravenous profiteers will never actually see the sharp end of the stake themselves.

Jennings' website brags that "he has consistently worked to develop administrative, legislative, and private sector policies/interventions to ensure better stewardship of and a greater return on investment on the nation’s nearly $3 trillion investment in health care."

It's therefore perfectly natural that the health care section of the Biden-Sanders Task Force would precede its prescriptions with showering praise on the Affordable Care Act. If it were not for Trump and those nasty old Republicans, we would be even closer to the ultimate goal of affordable, for-profit health care for everybody!

"Democrats will always fight to save Americans’ lives by making it easier and more affordable to go to the doctor, get prescription medicines, and access preventive testing and treatments. Our policy agenda is designed to produce real results for the American people—not hollow platitudes," the eight members in thrall to the Bipartisan Policy Lobby assure us in platitudes that are not hollow at all, but filled to the absolute brim with wads and gobs of the usual neoliberal stuffing.

How do you substitute "access" for guaranteed care that is free at the point of entry? Let us count the ways. The apparent task of the Task Force is to use the word Access over and over again in hopes of numbing us to the word's nothingness as effectively as the Trump administration is openly striving to numb us to the daily nightmare of millions of people succumbing to Covid-19.

For people who risk losing their insurance coverage if they lose their jobs in this pandemic, Democrats believe the federal government should pick up 100 percent of the tab for COBRA insurance, which keeps people on their employer-sponsored plans. For those who are still unemployed or do not have access to employer-sponsored health care when their COBRA eligibility period expires and are eligible for premium-free coverage, we will take action to automatically roll them over to other coverage options, so they do not experience any gap in health care. We will also re-open the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, even outside of the normal open enrollment season, and expand subsidies to make it easier for people to buy coverage.

Even in the midst of a pandemic, we must never lose our status as consumers of health care product. Even on our death-beds and even to our dying breaths, we must never forget the neoliberal mantra of "but how am I going to pay for that?"

Democrats will also make available on the marketplace a platinum-level, federally administered health insurance option with low fees and no deductibles, so that everyone will have access to this high-quality, low-cost plan. Low-income Americans will be automatically enrolled in this federally-administered option at zero cost to them. We will keep these emergency measures in place until the pandemic ends and unemployment falls significantly. And should the United States find itself in another pandemic or severe economic downturn in the future, these protections will again be made automatically available, so Americans are never again left to fend for themselves in times of crisis.

So  even if you manage to recover from Covid-19 but later come down with cancer or another life-endangering disease, you will immediately revert back to desperate "but how am I going to pay for that!" mode. Platinum is expensive and insurance executives and private equity moguls have to profit so as to afford their yachts and jets.

As if to bipartisanly prove that Republicans have no corner on the prevarication market, the Democratic Task Masters of the Universe proffer this nonsense:

Democrats believe we need to protect, strengthen, and build upon our bedrock health care programs, including the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Affairs system. Private insurers need real competition to ensure they have incentive to provide affordable, quality coverage to every American. 

 Notwithstanding that the public option, rather than advocacy for Single Payer, is negotiating from a starting point of weakness, such a plan would in no way give private insurers the incentive to do right by Americans. Just the opposite, in fact : a public option would absolve private insurers from paying for coverage for the sickest among us. This might reduce premiums for a time, but it would do nothing to drive down costs. The public option would be just one more subsidy for Aetna, Blue Cross and United Health, given that the bulk of their paying customers would now be in the healthy, low-risk pool.

To be fair, there are indeed faint echoes of Bernie Sanders's voice here and there within the Task Force report. An example that might have come straight out of his campaign stump speech:

Too many Americans struggle to afford the prescription drugs they need to get or stay healthy. No American should find themselves foregoing or rationing medications because they can’t afford to pay—especially when taxpayers’ money underwrites the research and development of many prescription drugs in the first place. Democrats will take aggressive action to ensure that Americans do not pay more for prescription drugs than people in other advanced economies. We will empower Medicare to at last be able to negotiate prescription drug prices for all public and private purchasers—for families and businesses, as well as older Americans—no matter where they get their coverage. We will also ensure and enforce that the price of brand-name and outlier generic drugs cannot rise faster than the inflation rate. We will cap out-of-pocket drug costs for seniors, and ensure that effective treatments for chronic health conditions are available at little or no cost. 

But again, the emphasis is on purchasing power, not on the right to receive health care. We'll still pay through the nose, but the rate at which we pay through the nose will be slowed down a tad under Democrats. Freedom's just another word for capitalism having nothing left to lose, what with a whole dying world to keep on exploiting. 

It's a good thing that copyright laws do not apply to book titles. Mary Trump's ballyhooed "Too Much Is Never Enough" takedown of her Uncle Donald is already the veritable motto of bloodsucking capitalism itself.

Trump is just the symptom. Cutting him out in November might ease the pain for a minute, but the cure for what ails us will never come from a neoliberal restoration of corporate Democrats.

Bernie Sanders claiming that Joe Biden "wants to be the most progressive president ince FDR" is like the Nobel Committee giving Droner-in-Chief Barack Obama its Peace Prize. It's not only purely aspirational, it's downright delusional.

Plutocrats, Platitudes and Pitchforks

Even an unemployed whiz kid ex-mayor has to eat. Therefore, former presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is charging some very big bucks for Folks to go online on July 16th to hear him yuk it up with Hillary Clinton.

Fifty dollars will only allow you to eavesdrop on At Home With Hillary and Pete. But if you fork over $2,500, you can then advance to Virtual Host status, and Hill and Pete will actually talk back to - or at least at - you. The duo's respective PACs (Onward Together for Clinton and Win The Era for Buttigieg) will then split the ticket sales.

Pete vows that he will use his share of the take to "replace the current politics and do away with the division and cruelty that have characterized the Trump era and also ensure we have strong leaders at every level of government."

To obtain access to the specific ways in which Pete will accomplish this task while not running for or holding any public office  and exerting no influence on public policy whatsoever, we are taken to his website, called (what else) Win the Era. Now, if that name sounds all too creepily similar to Barack Obama's first term Win the Future head-fake designed to make the foreclosed, the evicted and the downsized believe that austerity was good for them while the rich only got obscenely richer, then please just relax. "Future" is irritatingly gauzy, while "Era" is irritatingly grandiose. They are different, yet ever so unique forms of the same neoliberal jargon.  The use of the word "win" is practically required so as to hammer home the point that you must claw and compete at every stage of your life in order to become the entrepreneur of your own life.

Specifically, Pete wants to enlighten us to the fact that "so many unsustainable features of our old status quo were both exposed and exploited by Trump's  (Covid-19) crisis, the disempowerment of workers, the racial disparities in health care access, poor coordination with other countries and international bodies, the reduction of believing in science as a political preference.

"Now is our chance to elect leaders at every level of government who will build a better, more inclusive future for this country and the next generation," he grandly concludes with just the right touch of gauziness.

What kind of candidates would those be, you may ask?

For the answer to that question, please look no further than the designated  moderator for the online soiree, freshman congress-critter Lauren Underwood (IL-14). See how how carefully Pete advocates only for the people of the future, rather than for the currently existing desperate ones. He calls for access to health care for black and brown people, rather than guaranteed care that is free at the point of entry. Then notice that Underwood herself is not a proponent of Medicare for All, even right in the middle of the pandemic which is disproportionately sickening and killing black and brown people. Then notice the extremely high price of admission to At Home with Hillary and Pete.

The event is for rich people who don't want poor people to have nice things. I got my invite by total mistake!

Reactions from the woke hoi polloi to this roller coaster ride of hope deferred and access denied have been mixed. "Stop, stop, it's too much. The queen and the boy prince. This sparks joy!" gushed one invitee, while another person griped, "I really want to see them together (and Lauren Underwood, too) but I don't have $50 to shell out to a PAC."

Lauren Underwood, paradoxically enough, won her congressional seat in 2018 in part by virtue of the false accusation by Republican incumbent Randy Hultgren that she was for single payer health care. With her credentials as a registered nurse with advanced public health degrees, you'd forgive him for thinking that she would have seen enough pain and suffering and grim statistics on morbidity and mortality rampant in our cruel healthcare marketplace that like the majority of her profession, she would want to get rid of the whole rotten for-profit system.

But he and you would be thinking wrong, because she was never employed in a clinical care setting. Right after graduating Johns Hopkins, she went to work in the Obama administration to help implement the Affordable Care Act.

When Obama left office in 2017, Underwood became senior director of policy and regulatory affairs at Chicago's Next Level Health, a Medicaid managed care plan owned by Cheryl Whitaker, the wife of Obama's friend, foundation trustee and Harvard classmate Eric Whitaker. Her business came under scrutiny when it emerged that a miraculous algorithm was funneling her more than one third of the state's Medicaid patients who hadn't requested a particular plan. This influx was despite the fact that Next Health was designated the worst-managed care plan, under six different metrics, in the entire state of Illinois.

Next Level Health just announced that it will be closing this month. 

 "Insurance is a very capital-intensive business," Whitaker said in a statement to Crain's confirming the closure. "COVID-19 has exacerbated the difficulty of black-owned businesses to access capital. NextLevel Health's community-based approach combines a culturally sensitive lens and the recognition of social determinants of health to provide Medicaid members access to quality care that has the power to improve lives immediately and long term. We look forward to lending our expertise to community partners and other providers to holistically treat and heal our communities. Our work is not done."

With neoliberal Newspeak like that, maybe she can hustle up some capital by joining her former policy director on stage with Pete and Hill. 

Speaking of work not yet done, and millions of indigent patients not yet totally done in by the pandemic and other health problems caused by racialized capitalism, hubby Dr. Eric Whitaker's private equity firm will be buying three more Chicago-area hospitals this month. The future of these hospitals, right in the middle of a pandemic, is not yet clear. Whitaker already has a history of purchasing hospitals, declaring the least profitable of them bankrupt and then reselling the property at a tidy profit. His firm is currently being sued for fraud by a Chicago suburb that lost its hospital.

 "I'm an entrepreneur at heart," he once explained to a journalist.

Maybe we can become entrepreneurs too, and find a way to sneak into Hill and Pete's and Lauren's virtual soiree without paying, just to mess with their thick heads.

After all, with pitchforks showing up in the Hamptons to mess with such quarantined billionaire icons as Michael Bloomberg, anything is possible. Not to mention absolutely necessary if we have any hope at all of not so much winning the era but correcting the error of too much wealth in too few greedy, grasping hands.