Oligarchic Gaslight In America's Twilight

If the billionaires who own the place want their failing state to turn an even bigger profit for them, their first task is to ensure that the superfluous population keeps fighting among themselves instead of punching up at them, their real oligarchic enemy.  

Only in America could the worst pandemic in modern human history vie for media attention with the tragedy of "divided government" and a supposed mass outbreak of violence and verbal vitriol among ordinary people fighting with each other over masks and political parties that don't care about them. If people weren't supposedly fighting each other all the time, they might stop and remember that three out of every four of them, both conservative and liberal, want the government to provide and finance their health care. And then, if people started making demands to benefit one and benefit all, the media would finally be forced to cover and report on what people really want.

To prevent that from ever happening, we're instead being fed competing stereotypical culture war narratives aimed at deflecting our attention away from the cruelty emanating from the highest of high places and directing our ire toward a whole panoply of Others. Fox News viewers get a cartoon picture of snobbish "woke" latte-sipping socialists and their hired Antifa thugs, while MSNBC fans learn to abhor supposed hordes of racist anti-mask cultists who always vote against their own interests. 

If you don't think that this hand-wringing narrative of Divided Regular Americans is all part of the plan and the "fix," look no further than two articles in Tuesday's New York Times. Regarding the tactics and aims of the ruling oligarchy, they are case studies in both self-contradiction and gaslighting.

The first, concerning "Biden's Economic Plan For the Virus," casts the oligarchs as deeply concerned and caring souls who only want the best for each and every one of us. They care so very much, in fact. that part of their propaganda is aimed at us with actual bullet points:

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris yesterday outlined their plan to help restore the economy while battling the coronavirus, calling on Congress to act immediately and insisting on the need for bipartisan cooperation.

Biden and Harris spoke from Wilmington, Del., immediately after meeting via Zoom with business and labor leaders. In his remarks, the president-elect described that conversation as "very encouraging," painting it as an example of his campaign message - national unity - in action.

He said that both the C.E.O.s and the union bosses had agreed that the government must act boldly to bring the economy back up to speed. “I wish you could’ve heard — corporate leaders and labor leaders singing the same hymnal here,” he said.

That touchy-feely propaganda about a meeting (to which the public was not invited) of a new era of rich and poor being all in this together is directly contradicted by the article in the same issue called "In Georgia, Private Equity Is Investing in Divided Government." Centering around a pair of runoff elections early next year which will determine the Senate majority, it bluntly asserts that without manufactured gridlock, the rich cannot possibly get richer at the expense of everyone else. The fix is in. Despite what their lackey Joe Biden tells us,  the ruling oligarchy doesn't even remotely want to fix what they themselves have broken. And Biden knows it:

Government gridlock protects private equity’s business model, ensuring that major changes proposed by Democrats, like Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Stop Wall Street Looting Act, won’t become law, Mr. Valadez said. (Richard Valdez of the nonprofit Americans For Financial Reform.) Mr. Biden got the most direct contributions associated with private equity in 2020, but Republican Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, John Cornyn of Texas and Susan Collins of Maine were the next-biggest recipients, reflecting the sector’s preference for divided government.

Still, the Times must go through the motions of providing fair and balanced propaganda, evidenced by its Dealbook subsidiary's hosting of a concern-trolling online summit starring such oligarchic luminaries as tech mogul Bill Gates, who has no qualms about departing from his own area of expertise to pontificate about vaccine confidence. They're saving Elizabeth Warren for the end of the long day, when people are beginning to get fatigued and tuning out, to prod her about how her mild anti-corruption bill would hurt Wall Street, pretending that it actually has a chance of passing, not to mention ever being enforced if it does get passed after the requisite watering down. They want assurances from Warren that Joe Biden will treat them well, pretending (yet again) that there is a slight chance he will not treat them well while wagging the occasional scolding finger at them for appearance's sake.

Given his administration appointments so far, they haven't got a worry in the world which they have plundered to near-extinction.

All the World's a Staged Coup

Donald Trump is at heart a showman and a provocateur, so his purging of the Pentagon and his charges of election fraud and refusal to concede are probably just the latest clumsy tools in his bottomless "make me the center of attention" toy toolbox. Or so I'd been thinking.

But now that journalists whom I respect, such as David Sirota and the writers at the World Socialist Website, are laying out perfectly plausible scenarios for how an honest-to-goodness military coup and/or the overturning of election results by Republican legislatures in such key battleground states as Pennsylvania, to be later upheld by the right-wing Supreme Court, I'm beginning to have some uncomfortable second thoughts.

And the fact that the New York Times, heretofore the mainstream media champion of #Resistance, Inc, is downplaying the coup narrative and enlisting two of its top national security reporters (a/k/a CIA mouthpieces) to do so, also makes me wonder what is really up. As long as the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff remains in charge, the Times article reassures us, there is no possible way that the right-wing ideologues and cronies that Trump has appointed to key positions will have the power to do much at all.     

And while the Republicans are making their own big show of supporting a second term for Trump, behind the scenes they reportedly are making arrangements to brief the Biden transition team on classified national security and intelligence matters. This to the ultimate benefit of the Uniparty and the military-industrial complex which each faction so slavishly serves.

Meanwhile, even if and when his physical coup fails, Donald Trump will have won in the psychological warfare category. Isn't he just taking his own page from the Clinton campaign's "we wuz robbed" playbook? Two can play the government-in-exile game as easily as one. The Trumpian restoration movement is already a done deal, and Campaign 2024 will be in full throttle before you know it.

Not that the defeated president's mischief-making doesn't have a bright side. The powers-that-be are aghast, for example, that Trump might finally order all the troops home from Afghanistan after a two-decade occupation. He is threatening to declassify documents that allegedly prove beyond all reasonable doubt that Russiagate is the fictional product of the de facto CIA/DNC Partnership. He is threatening to fire Gina Haspel, the CIA director who not only destroyed tapes documenting Bush-era torture but who allegedly presided over some of the torture sessions herself. 

Even when Trump does ultimately leave office, the permanent security state fears that he will become a walking, talking Wikileaks, spilling all kinds of state secrets and chipping away at whatever legitimacy and public support they still enjoy. If they're not also fearfully mentioning that he might pardon Julian Assange, it is probably because they don't want to give him any more ideas on how to jeopardize their reputations and careers.

Isn't it nerve-wracking enough that Trump is considered a long shot to replace Alex Trebek on Jeopardy?

Here, though, is the bottom-up coup that the oligarchs and their bickering apparatchiks are really afraid of. (warning: contains strong but very refreshing language.)

The Nightmare-To-Nap Transition Must Fail

We were deafened by the sound of jubilant crowds singing Hamilton show tunes in the streets, we were dazzled by the sky above Wilmington's Chase Center shrine to capitalism and entertainment lighting up with fireworks spelling J-O-E in garish patriotic hues, we were brought to tears by the president-elect shaking his fist, quoting the Bible, and blessing the great American war machine.

What better way to prove to the whole world, yearning for a return to American supremacy. that our long fascistic nightmare is finally over?

Now comes the hard work. The Democratic leadership's immediate task (besides pivoting from the Putin scapegoat to the AOC/Squad scapegoat to explain its electoral failures) is to start slathering so many globs of greasepaint on the Trump-cracked visage of American hegemony that it would make Hamilton fold and Broadway dim, had they not already closed and dimmed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

So the incoming Biden team is raising the curtain on a brand-new website which, if it doesn't put you right to sleep after that weekend champagne brunch you learned that you'd feasted on if you are an MSNBC-watcher or a New York Times subscriber, is at least designed to seduce you into the semi-waking world of a rebranded Normal.  

They're giving us a teaser of their play in four acts: Covid-19, Economic Recovery, Racial Equity and Climate Change. I call it a teaser because there is no actual dialogue or plot. It is still very much in the treatment stage, when they're all sitting around and pitching vague ideas. For now, the audience will just have to exist on the hype and be left guessing whether the final product will be a tragedy or a comedy.

This is the typical gambit of the Neoliberal Players who've been touring the country and the globe with their stale scripts for the past forty or so years. Only the top billings and the costumes periodically change, while the repertory ethos itself stays relatively intact.

Under the working title of "Economic Recovery," for example, we don't learn anything specific about how Joe Biden will tangibly make our lives better. We learn only that Joe Biden believes in you and respects you, as long if you get up every day to work hard to "sustain America."

"Make no mistake. America has been knocked down," he announces, as though people are either too stupid to realize they've been knocked down, or worse, are in complete denial. But he wants you to know that he believes in you anyway!

And really, who needs Medicare For All when all you really need is folksy Uncle Joe - actually an unnamed spokesperson for Uncle Joe -  reassuring you that for him, "health care is personal."

 He believes that every American has a right to the peace of mind that comes with knowing they have access to affordable, quality health care. He knows that no one in this country should have to lay in bed at night staring at the ceiling wondering, “what will I do if she gets breast cancer?” or “if he has a heart attack?” “Will I go bankrupt?” He knows there is no peace of mind if you cannot afford to care for a sick child or a family member because of a pre-existing condition, because you’ve reached a point where your health insurer says “no more,” or because you have to make a decision between putting food on the table and going to the doctor or filling a prescription.

You don't have the right to health care. You only have the right to peace of mind knowing that you can "access health care" by some unknown means, which perhaps includes crawling on your hands and knees to the nearest private equity-staffed emergency room. You at least should have the god-given right to score an affordable sleeping pill to prevent you from worrying about death or bankruptcy or starvation.

Biden's public relations people go on to blather about an imaginary world where everybody who works hard should get a fair shot and a fair shake, which actually skates dangerously close to plagiarizing Barack Obama. And why wouldn't it, since it's probably the same P.R. team that is still churning out this verbiage.

Biden, we are told,plans to tear down the systemic racism that he had such a large part in building with his Crime Bill, by "investing in" Black, Latino and Native American entrepreneurs and helping them to "access" affordable housing. This is in lieu of actually creating a government-run jobs program and building new public housing stock.

To see this agenda through, President-elect Biden will make new, bold investments and speed up the timetable for many of the 10-year investments he has already announced. He has a plan to pay for the ongoing costs of the plan by reversing some of Trump’s tax cuts for corporations and imposing common-sense tax reforms that finally make sure the wealthiest Americans pay their fair share.

Beware the neoliberal buzzword "common-sense." It's just a sneaky way of saying that the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer while perhaps getting an extra crumb here and there so that they'll still have enough strength left to toil for the rich.

As David Harvey explains in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, this constant touting of "common sense"is simply a gaslighting ploy to create and enforce consent in the targeted populace:

"It is not the same as 'good sense' that can be constructed out of critical engagement with the issues of the day  'Common sense' can, therefore be profoundly misleading, obfuscating or  disguising real problems under cultural prejudices. Cultural and traditional values (such as belief in God and country or views on the position of women in society) and fears (of communists, immigrants, strangers or 'others') can be mobilized to mask other realities. Political slogans can be invoked that mask specific strategies beneath vague rhetorical devices. The word 'freedom' resonates so widely within the common-sense understanding of Americans that it (per Gramsci) becomes 'a button that elites can press to open the door to the masses' to justify almost anything."

As long as the right buzzwords, like "fairness," "common sense," "access, "democracy" and "freedom" are used, all the economic power resting in a few elite hands can gain at least a modicum of, if not popular support, at least popular submission.

We snooze, we lose.

Barack Obama's sonorous voice had the magical effect of anesthetizing liberals, who became so rudely awakened when Donald Trump was elected. Joe Biden has no such oratorical talents, no comparable ability to obfuscate the cruel neoliberal agenda with anything close to Obama's glibness and charm and charisma. 

For such small favors, we should be grateful and optimistic.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are just the impetus we need. They should inspire us to get up every day to sustain and hone our critical thinking skills and anger to unprecedented levels. They actually do make it ridiculously easy, not least because both have a tendency to go off their neoliberal buzzword scripts, revealing their true personalities and agendas.

 

 

 

Happy Undecided Election Apocalypse Day!

 Well, my pipe dream from yesterday of a Biden blowout and a chastened Trump certainly went up in a quick puff of bitter acrid smoke, didn't it? I was right about one thing, though. And that was the uniformly vapid, stunned, slack-jawed faces of the news personalities who had been confidently predicting a Biden landslide. They just couldn't keep up with each others' lame excuses and platitudes.

 It feels like 2000 all over again. Hanging chads to go with your morning hangover, anyone?

Without winning the Senate,  and even if he does finally squeak through, Joe Biden will be a terminally damaged president from Day One. I look on the bright side of this scenario, though. The honeymoon will be over long before he ever makes it to the White House if he does in fact make it to the White House. His failure to swiftly dispatch Trump says more about him than it does about the millions upon millions of voters who turned out in record numbers to cast their ballots this year, right in the middle of a pandemic. The trouble is that they turned out for Trump at least as vigorously as they turned out to vote for what is essentially a negative candidate in an empty suit, a/k/a the "Not-Trump."

Correction: Joe Biden's suit is empty only insofar that he lacks ideas to make life better for people. (More on what he's full of in a minute.) He not only refuses to make meaningless promises, he relishes rubbing your face in your pile of misery. There will not only be no Medicare For All (which, according to a Fox News exit poll conducted Tuesday, 70 percent of all voters of both parties desire) but he vows to veto such a bill if it ever crosses his desk. There will be no guaranteed income, no Green New Deal, not much of anything at all.  Instead, his suit is full to bursting with war plans for the voters' sons and daughters, accolades for the "good rich," and ornery scolding of anti-racism protesters, whom on more than one occasion he has characterized as looters and property-destroyers. He and his party seem to be under the impression that their voting base (the ones who don't finance their campaigns and dictate policy, anyway) are a crew of masochists just dying for the whip and chain treatment from good old Uncle Joe.

It gets worse. Trump was not only holding his own as of Wednesday morning, he was actually picking up more support from Black and Hispanic people, and women. The one demographic where he's falling short is white men. More white men were voting  for Biden than were voting for Trump. You know - the demographic that the liberal class has been denigrating for the past four years as racist sexist reprobates. So it will be interesting to see how the Democratic Party twists this inconvenient statistic into a big soggy undigestible pretzel. But I suspect it will have something to do with Russian disinformation and Putin meddling with the brains of Black people, Hispanic people, and women of all races, colors and creeds.

In other words, even if he hobbles over the finish line, Joe Biden will not enjoy much of a popular mandate. His political capital will consist of a handful of plug nickels in the pocket of his empty suit. The fruits of his victory will be shriveled and sour. The grimmest part is that he and his party will no doubt use their close call to move even further to the  right, choosing to interpret the unexpectedly large turnout for Trump as the stupid voters' desire and need for even more punishment. As Barack Obama chided a disgruntled foreclosed electorate in announcing new anti-deficit measures when he lost the House in 2010, "You have to eat your peas!" 

A decade later, it'll be the same old bipartisan story: the bottom 80 percent of the "soul of the nation" must be cleansed with the stiff wire brush of austerity.

Of course, when Joe Biden insipidly talks about fighting for the soul of  the nation, what he really means is the rotten core of Neoliberal Capitalism and its defenders in the permanent Military/Surveillance State. Trump had the untoward effect of making too many people take to the streets, demonstrating against a police state whose main function is guarding the  security and property of the grossly wealthy, who had already staged their own coup 40-odd years ago. They got Ronald Reagan to join financialized capitalism and government at the hip, not only creating a permanent ruling class but inculcating the philosophy of cutthroat competition and consumerism into the very fabric of everyday life. The destruction of organized labor was their coup de grace, with Bill Clinton putting on the finishing touches with the end of cash aid to the poor, the deregulation of Wall Street, and the media consolidation of the Telecom Act.

 The elite owners are always in need a slick president who can pretend to be on the side of the lower orders to keep the lower orders relatively placated and subservient. With Donald Trump, however, they ended up with one of their own kind who was not adept enough to keep his mouth shut while doing their complete bidding. In that blunt way of his, he appeals to a sizeable segment of the population despite his criminal ineptitude in dealing with the worst pandemic in modern history.

Just weeks after recovering from the virus himself, Trump was holding multiple rallies a day. Biden barely even campaigned. It turns out that the Invisible Man was not such a hot candidate after all.

 

But do they really care if he loses, when they can fund-raise every single day as the Resistance Fighters of the Fake Opposition?

Happy Election Apocalypse Day!

 

 'Twas the day before Election Night, and what should appear, but boarded-up buildings, folks quaking in fear.

Or at least that is what the TV and establishment media are reporting and graphically showing us. If people aren't shooting each other over lawn signs bearing the grimacing dentured visages of one or the other of our unattractive geriatric candidates, they're roaming the highways looking for a campaign bus to run off the road. 

Either people really are going sincerely insane over an election that will essentially determine which man will get to serve the oligarchy for the next four years while screwing everyone else, or we're all just unwitting, unpaid actors on a stage or unpaid amateur Kayfabe wrestlers in an invisible ring.

Are either Trump or Biden really worth fighting with your relatives over, and losing friends over?  Why can't everybody just make it the five-minute civic duty that it was intended to be, a mere blip on the radar of our lives?

Election Night feels almost like Christmas Eve. (And yes, it should be a national holiday with mandatory voting.) We'll finally find out who's been naughty or nice. And when it's all over, it'll probably feel just like the letdown that children get after opening the very last present underneath the Christmas tree. That is if Biden wins in an undisputed landslide. No more guessing, no more wishing. You got exactly what you wanted, but it just didn't give you the euphoria that you were expecting.

Here's one of the Doomsday scenarios that nobody is talking about, because doing so would tamp down the fear and excitement and hurt the ratings:

Joe Biden wins so resoundingly tonight in a few early key battleground states that there can be no question of fraud. Trump concedes at around 3 a.m.,graciously calling Biden to congratulate him.  All his threatening talk turned out to be just talk! He turned out be nothing but a great big blustering fake. Who could have guessed? What a bummer. What a letdown for all the prognosticators who were forecasting a coup. They'll be as open-mouthed and flabbergasted as they were on that dreadful night four years ago when the Inevitable Hillary lost.

Scattered riots might break out and a few irate people will shoot each other because that is what is expected of them, and networks with air to fill and fear to foment will have to cover even a deflated aftermath like it's the outbreak of Civil War 2.0.

Meanwhile, Trump will be seeking and signing non-prosecution agreements with various state attorneys general as part of his deal to go away quietly. He'll be putting out bids for multiple post-presidential reality TV shows as well as inking movie and book and branding and motivational speaking circuit deals. Like Obama, he will forgo the traditional presidential library and start fundraising like mad for a Trump Presidential Entertainment Resort complex complete with a professional golf course and with no books except for his own self-glorifying memoirs. All his presidential papers will be selectively digitized.

Biden will be putting his own finishing touches on his bipartisan cabinet, collating the various recommendations from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.

With the Democrats attaining a slim majority in the Senate, they'll immediately let bygones be bygones with the Republicans. Like Harry Reid before him, new Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will make a gentlemen's agreement with a pretend-conciliatory Mitch McConnell to keep the filibuster in place in exchange for McConnell's promise not to abuse it this time.  As a sign of his temporary good faith, McConnell will even agree to a watered-down Covid relief package. Trump agrees to sign it in exchange for a pardon from Joe Biden. Biden will channel Gerald Ford and declare that our long national nightmare is over. He will also channel Barack Obama's refusal to prosecute Bush-era torturers and war criminals by vowing that we must look forward and not backward.

 Trump's rehabilitation will begin.

That is just one of a zillion scenarios. We'll know soon enough if mine is a crazy pipe dream. But just in case Santa is watching, let's at least try to pretend to be nice to one another. Because the ruling oligarchy is simply not worth losing our humanity or our lives over.

On Being Greenwalded

Glenn Greenwald's beef with The Intercept, it seems to me, has just as much to do with the violation of his contract as it does with his editor censoring or attempting to censor a piece he wrote about the Hunter Biden scandal, a/k/a "Laptopgate."

As a co-founder of the news organization that paid his salary, Greenwald had written a clause into his contract which granted him total editorial independence and immunity from the dreaded blue pencil of any editor. It's the rare journalist indeed who can draw a handsome salary with one hand and not only write freely with the other, but never even have to bodily show up in the newsroom.

The feeble legal defense being proffered by The Intercept editor is that this immunity only applied to his opinion pieces and not to his news pieces. Given that Greenwald has always written with a civil libertarian slant, the line between news and opinion as it pertained to his work has always been on the fuzzy side. His muckraking articles, at least the ones that I've read in the last decade or so, have always had his unabashed, often sarcastic, and righteously indignant persona running right through each and every one of them.

Although I'd immediately plopped The Intercept right on my eclectic "Blog Roll" almost the minute it went live, I recently found myself reading it less and less, as his work began appearing less and less, and as the rest of the site began going more and more mainstream. When his articles did appear, they were relegated to small-font headlines at the bottom of the page. So rather than checking in every day, I started checking in once or twice a week, at most.

Just because Greenwald is now gone from the site, however, doesn't mean I'm going to ban The Intercept from my own blog list. There's already enough cancel culture out there. I still enjoy reading some of their writers, including Ryan Grim and Lee Fang, while giving others a pass. James Risen, whom I used to so admire for his fight against the New York Times for its own censorship of his investigative series on the war crimes of the George W. Bush administration (until Bush was safely re-elected and after Risen had threatened to go public and independent with a book), has now devolved into a Russiagate mouthpiece for the CIA. I would assume that the undoubtedly generous pay package that Risen is getting from billionaire Pierre Omidyar has a lot to do with his pivot to cooperation.

Of course, since Greenwald himself is reportedly a millionaire thanks to his reporting on the Edward Snowden leak, with the Pulitzer and the Oscar that went along with it, he certainly is in no danger of starving. To his credit, he is continuing the good fight along with a precious few other independent journalists who are still publishing and broadcasting on a national and even international level from widely visible platforms.

As a journalist myself, the closest I've ever come to national "recognition" was my decade or so writing reader comments on the New York Times. before new "community" management and a sharp rise in subscriptions after Trump was elected resulted in most of my commentary being suppressed. I finally decided to quit the endeavor when moderators approved one too many comments hysterically accusing me of being a Trump supporter, a single-handed Hillary-defeater, a Russian asset, or all three. 

 McCarthyism has developed an undeniable liberal bias, and it's become all too damaging to way too many people. 

All the journalists who are now so gleefully and maliciously piling on Glenn Greenwald are probably afraid for their own jobs. With just days to go before the presidential election, none of them wants to be viewed or remembered as the writer who gave us four more years of Trump because they either defended Greenwald, or they dared even ask a question about the Biden scandal. To delve into this story, if it doesn't kill their careers outright, will damage their access to the expected Biden administration.

During my own very first reporting job in the late 70s, at an extremely conservative local newspaper (the long-defunct Newburgh, NY Evening News) a Republican named Joan Shapiro was running for mayor in that majority Black city on the racist "law and order" platform that was so popular at the time. One Saturday morning, as I was perusing the previous night's police blotter at the cop shop, I came across the arrest sheet of Shapiro's own teenage son, who'd been busted with a bunch of his buddies in a vandalism spree. I duly wrote up the incident in my usual low-key crime report roundup, and it passed inspection by the weekend editor, who got a pretty good chuckle over the irony of it all.

And then, come Monday morning, all hell broke loose. Since the newspaper had endorsed Shapiro, and its top brass very much shared her paranoid concerns about Black crime, I was in big, big trouble. My male boss informed me that I had done a very mean bitchy thing, reducing a female candidate to tears and deliberately trying to ruin her political career.

Long story short: Joan Shapiro went on to win that election in a landslide as well as a second term. Me? From that day on, until I finally resigned (when the paper was sold and upon being offered the coveted 6 p.m. - 2 a.m. graveyard shift), I  was silently frozen out of big assignments. My offense was that I had violated the unwritten rule which applies to journalists everywhere: Be a crusading muckraker, sure, and win awards for investigative series, and expose the bad guys - but only as long as the bad guys aren't big advertisers. and only as long as the bad guys don't belong to the favored political party, or only as long as they don't belong to the same country club as the boss.

So, yeah, I definitely empathize with Glenn Greenwald. I can also empathize, to a certain very minimal extent, with the fellow journalists who are piling on - or just as bad, staying completely and complicitly silent. The story of "you have to go along to get along" is as old as human civilization itself, and it applies to every profession.

One good thing about writing this blog for the past 10 years is that I can write whatever I want, with total editorial independence. Nobody is going to fire me, although the censorious Google algorithm has certainly buried me, right along with most other independent bloggers and Youtubers from both the right and the left.

Censorship is real. Big Brother is real. So kudos to Glenn Greenwald for sticking to his principles and - to the probable chagrin of his former employer - bringing all that much more attention to political hypocrisy and corruption. I hopes he sues for breach of contract.

In closing, though I have already written to most of you individually with only a few more thank-you notes left to compose, let me express my profound gratitude for the fantastic reader response to my recent fund-raiser.

Above all, please keep the great comments and suggestions coming!

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Abandon Hope, Get Out and Vote

That giant sucking sound you may or may not be hearing is the death of any second stimulus package for pandemic relief. If you're not hearing it, it's because the corporate media have chosen not to write the obituary. Besides, they're way too busy covering the tech moguls and congress critters convening remotely to argue yet again about all that horrible misinformation and disinformation and discord-sowing on the Internet. 

They're too busy to cover their own cover-up of the hard truth that our politicians have deliberately refused to help their constituents.

So, to distract you from the reality that there will be no more $1200 stimulus checks and no more enhanced unemployment benefits to help stave off hunger and eviction, the New York Times is running on its front page two side-by-by side photos of extremely well-stocked refrigerators. You are asked to guess which one is a Trump voter's and which one is a Biden voter's. There are apparently no other types of Americans who eat. There are no third party voters, no write-in voters and no abstaining voters. There are also apparently no Americans with bare refrigerators, despite the fact that at least eight million have slipped into poverty just in the few months since the pandemic aid dried up.

In case that fun fridge quiz didn't distract or satiate you, the Times is also running "The Anxious Person's Guide to the 2020 Election." Some people apparently are so jittery that they don't even know when Election Day is. Or at least the Times thinks so, because it is the very first topic on their list of existential anxieties. To further distract the anxious from their empty refrigerators and bank accounts, the Times also soothes the fears of people who can't sleep at night because they don't know what a naked ballot is. 

Nowhere on the Times front page is there any announcement that, due to the lack of agreement on a new economic package, we're all screwed until at least next month, next year, or possibly forever. 

Meanwhile, we are drowning in the third wave of the Covid pandemic. Or, according to some experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, we are still riding the first wave that is cresting again. 

It's really a tsunami of destruction for all but the extremely rich, for whom the pandemic has been a windfall. Jeff Bezos has made so many more billions from Covid that he is reportedly now trying to add CNN to his global empire, further controlling the establishment "narrative" which aims to limit and suppress all sources of independent journalism and independent thought. Increasingly, one of the main functions of establishment media, as the above two examples in Wednesday's New York Times show, is to infantilize and gaslight the news-consuming public.

We're not only flailing around in a monster wave of disease, we're caught in the undertow of reactionary political malpractice. We are crashing ashore and getting sucked back out to sea at the same time, just like in a real tsunami. No wonder we're anxious.  

A Google search of "Stimulus Bill Dead" brings up a Times article titled "Dead, Alive, or On Life Support: Confusion Reigns on Stimulus" - dating all the way back to October 8.

Only two articles from the front page of my Wednesday search -  one from Forbes and one from New York Magazine - make the straightforward announcement that the stimulus deal is completely and ignominiously dead. To make this blunt admission is as much to announce that America is a failed state only six days before the election. No wonder the voter-shaming, click-baiting Times and other outlets aren't touching this harsh reality with a ten foot pole. Headlines of "probably dead," "could be dead," "could it really be dead this time?," "not really dead," or "alive again" do nothing but paint a rosy picture and keep the audience captive as they anxiously expect their elected reps to buckle down and help them.

Meanwhile, these outlets marvel that their audience members are waiting in such record long lines to vote, without really questioning why these unconscionably long lines exist in the first place. (hint: no new federal stimulus aid to the counties, states, towns and cities responsible for keeping the polling places open and adequately staffed.)

Ed Kilgore of New York Magazine is one of the few journalists who isn't ignoring or soft-pedaling the truth and promoting false hope. He writes that "there is no reason to think a stimulus deal will be imminent even after the election, when the incentive to make voters happy will have disappeared."

Actually, they have no incentive to make us happy now, right before an election, the only time they traditionally are forced to make an effort to make us happy. They aren't even pretending to care, not even in one of those rare intervals when we are allowed to hold them accountable. Even if they lose, they win. Elected office is increasingly viewed as the stepping-stone to vast wealth and new career opportunities - on cable TV, the vast networks of corporate-funded think tanks, private equity firms, hedge funds, and good old-fashioned direct lobbying, which is now known as "consultancy" to sidestep laws barring our public officials from cashing in too quickly.

Heck, they cash in while they're still in office. Look at all the stock-dumping and insider trading that members of  Congress did when they got their secret briefings early this year about the coming pandemic. 

Maybe sometime between now and the inauguration of the next president, people will finally start recovering from their presidential horse race psychoses and begin adding the words "strike" and "new parties" to their vocabularies. 

And beating their addiction to the Times, MSNBC, CNN, Fox and the rest of the Groupthink Conglomerate by spending more time reading books and alternative media. We have to learn to evict Trump from the squatting position he's taken up in our brains, with the aid and encouragement of the establishment media. This is regardless of whether he wins or loses.

And if he does lose, we have to be vigilant lest Joe Biden puts us all to sleep with his neoliberal reasonableness and those dreaded common-sense solutions and rhetoric about rich and poor being all in this together.